


Bittersweet

by Alasdair_you



Series: The Bordelon Dynasty [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal, Angst, BDSM, Bondage, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Male Slash, Mental Health Issues, Mpreg, Spanking, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2019-10-31 17:21:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 43,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17853890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasdair_you/pseuds/Alasdair_you
Summary: Two years after Emory's return to Coryth, things in the south have settled into something close to normal.  The Lierians and the Corians have settled into semi-comfortable coexistence, the throne is stable, and the city is rebuilt.  Grief over Nikita has slowly given way to something more akin to hatred and there's nothing but silence out of the north.  One northern Commander, however, is about to change all of that.-------Atara should have gone west.  That was the original plan.  Staying to be the support his brother needed has only proven detrimental to his own mental state, but it has allowed him to develop a close relationship with one escaped slave from Immara.  War with Immara is probably the worst thing he could want right now, but it's the only thing he's really hungry for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Narrator: Emory

“I asked for secrets, Sebastian,” I repeated myself and the young Lord Brighton fixed me with a cold, unnaturally irritated glare. Or rather, it was unnatural for Sebastian, who very rarely got angry with anything and was more likely to flippantly tell me off for pulling the rank card with him. That day had him in a sour mood because there _was_ one thing that could dig under his skin like a bad splinter and it was critiquing his work. He’d been functioning as spymaster for nearly two years by then, a post appointed to him just before I left my coronation march--it was a role designed and created specifically for him, one that had been unofficially titled the Grand Inquisitor.

He ground his teeth and rolled his shoulders, irritated. The harness that held his steel prosthetic on shifted and the hand that was perpetually shaped into a fist and hanging limp at his side or strapped to his chest moved unnaturally. “I brought you secrets,” he reminded me through clenched teeth. “Just because you don’t like the results or my opinion on what you should do with them doesn’t make them wrong.”

“If I wanted your opinion,” I informed him curtly. “I would have asked _you_ to be my Second, not your wife. The point of having secrets was to have _blackmail_. It was to _avoid_ the senseless slaughter we had to commit before we took the city.”

From the desk in the corner, I heard Cassiope sigh heavily, raking her fingers through limp, flaxen curls that hung in a pale, sickly looking face. “I happen to agree with him, Emory,” she spoke quietly, like using her voice was too exhausting a thing for her to be bothered with and I felt a pang of guilt at what I’d just said. As if he knew, Sebastian cocked an eyebrow like he was saying, ‘I told you so,’ while I fixed my eyes on the woman across the room. “Dumas wants the mines north of Ravndal. Even if we disregard the fact that the land belongs to--” She ground her teeth and looked pointedly down at the papers in front of her. “Belongs to the _Novaks_ and that they abandoned the mines because of the cost--”

“The cost?” Sebastian inquired. He was unnaturally good at what he did--at collecting secrets--and Sebastian could always be counted on to know which gentry frequented which brothels (in part because he’d bought most of them out himself), which lord preferred which whore, who had a mistress, who had a bastard they were keeping hidden, and whose ‘heir’ wasn’t really theirs at all...he could not be counted on to know statistics, logistics, or economics. In those fields, I relied entirely on Cassie and together, they formed Coryth’s newest power couple. There wasn’t a single member of the court that didn’t scramble for favors from her and that didn’t give him a wider berth than they gave bull sharks.

Cassie nodded weakly and exhaled, her arms dropping to the surface of the desk. She didn’t look like the Cassie I had come to know and love, but she could hardly be blamed for that. Arguably, she shouldn’t have been out of bed at all, but there she was. Albeit, she was missing the heavily laden jewels that she usually wore on her fingers, her throat, and pinned in her hair, all glowing Brighton blue…but she was there. “The climate in Glacia is notoriously inhospitable. It’s frigid. Worse than the mountains that guard Paikea. Underground, it’s even colder. People freeze to death down there, even in Glacian gear. Years and years ago, long before the Vale invaded the north, the Novaks--who were kings then--sealed the mines. It cost too much life, even for the silver buried in them, and Glacians value little more than they value the lives of their people.”

I scoffed. “Sure, as long as the people are acceptable according to their tradition.” I avoided thinking about Glacia. Since ascending the throne and returning home after the march, I’d done my very best to ignore the fact that they existed at all and they liked it that way. They sent a caravan south to pay their yearly taxes to the throne and then they weren’t heard from again. Thinking about Glacia meant thinking about Nikita and I preferred pretending that I didn’t know him at all. The pain was a little bit less prevalent that way. The _hate_ that had grown in his absence didn’t fester quite as profoundly if I didn’t have to remember him or the time I’d had with him, short as it was.

And I did hate him.

I _hated_ him. I’d spent every day that I’d been home staring out at the gate in the morning, a cup of tea spiked with bourbon in my hands, and I’d _begged_ whatever god would listen to let him come riding through the wrought iron to throw himself at my feet and apologize. He never did. It was stupid to expect him to. Tristan said it wasn’t his fault. His father had been a blacksmith to his life, beating and forging the metal that made him into exactly what he wanted him to be and when push came to shove, Nikita’s allegiance had remained steadfastly to the north. It didn’t matter what excuse he fed me or what claims he made about heirs and family. The reason he had stayed was because he’d never really severed the leash that Vasilev kept on him. He was a tethered war dog, little more than an animal to his Lord and father, and I believed wholeheartedly that Vasilev would send him into raid after raid until someone inevitably opened his abdomen and spilled the contents of it into the snow.

He’d only be happy with what Nikita had sacrificed when he’d sacrificed _all_ of it, because no matter how hard the Rider Commander ever tried to be what Vasilev wanted, he would never truly achieve it.

I noticed the silence that fell between them and Cassie eventually cleared her throat, slicing through the macabre mood that had descended on the three of us. Sebastian would have been content to suffer through it. He quite literally did not give a fuck about the atmosphere of a room he was in. Alternatively, it was entirely possible he didn’t really notice it. Sebastian, like Nikita, had been forged into a weapon of war. Discomfort was just part of the game for him.

“If Dumas is allowed to continue,” Cassie pushed softly. “ _If_ he ventures north and tries to seize those mines himself, the Riders in Ravndal _will_ fight back. Dumas is a talented strategist.”

“And a pompous pig,” Sebastian added acidly. 

Cassie nodded her head, relenting the point. “He has a large force, Emory. If he rides for Ravndal, I’m not saying he would win the fight. I don’t think he would, but Ravndal wouldn’t win it either. Nikita Novak is…” She pursed her lips and looked back down at her desk.

Sebastian finished for her. “Vicious,” he tacked on. “And immaculately trained and used to the terrain. He’s also vastly outnumbered.”

“Dumas’s nephew and heir, Anton, is much more moderate than his uncle. He participated in the Battle of Coryth. He recently put a great deal of money into building _fishing_ vessels rather than mining equipment,” Cassie continued. 

“He keeps a whore in Coryth,” Sebastian added. “Her name is Catherine. They have a daughter. Anton pays handsomely for the girl’s private education and she’s being raised by a governess that works for me.”

“You are not killing a child,” I said flatly and shot him a look. 

Sebastian wrinkled his nose. “I wasn’t suggesting we kill a child,” he drawled. “She is leverage you could use against Anton _if_ he were to inherit his uncle’s land and fortune...earlier than he expected to.”

I looked out the window over the spread of Coryth below me. The buildings had, for the most part, recovered from the siege. The walls had been repaired and shone with fresh, shining marble and Riordan had commissioned a large, stalking lion to be sculpted above the arch of the gate. He looked small and distant from where I was standing. So did the people, hundreds of thousands of small, dark spots milling around the streets and crowding into the market. It was unrecognizable from the place that Elizabeth Glenning had turned into a husk of disease and destruction. “And you agree with his suggestion, Cass?”

Cassie rubbed her eyes. “Emory,” she began, her voice thick and exhausted. “There’s no easy way to say it so I’m just going to...say it. If Dumas launches a full-scale invasion force into the north, we will have to respond. It will take months to get there and we would be fighting in snow and ice with soldiers who are used to humidity and thunderstorms and that’s provided there is anything left of Ravndal when we get there. There’s no guarantee that the other Riders would come to support the Novaks. It’s rare for them to mass as an army. They did it for the crown and because you paid them handsomely for it. Normally, they’re just…” She held her arms up and then let them flop back to the desk. “Warring clans of feral men. Point being, Your Majesty, it would put your favorite Commander right in the path of an invading army and he _will_ fight.”

“He is not my favorite Commander,” I deadpanned. “He’s nothing.”

Sebastian snorted that time. “Uh-huh. That’s why you replaced him with liquor and whores, right?”

“Whore,” I corrected, shrugging my shoulders uncomfortably. His tone was chafing my already raw nerves. “There’s only one.”

“Yeah. Named Nicolette. A Marsher with green eyes and red hair,” he reminded me. “I wonder who she reminds you of.”

“I would punch you right now, but I feel it would be unfair, all things considered,” I snarled in response and looked pointedly down at the prosthetic he was wearing. Sebastian still could have kicked my ass and we both knew it, which was why the insult lacked the bite that it should have. That combined with the fact that Sebastian made fun of his own missing limb as a way of coping (or something--Tristan had explained that, too, and said that masking pain with humor wasn’t particularly healthy, but I didn’t always listen to Tristan when he got on his soapbox) made it...less than satisfactory as far as stinging insults went.

Sebastian grinned widely in response. “Swing away, slugger,” he goaded, blowing his hair out of his eyes. 

Neither of us moved.

“Boys,” Cassie warned. “Please. I want to figure out this mess and go back to bed.”

“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” we both shot back at her, mirroring each other in a way that had become...commonplace for Sebastian and I. In Nikita’s absence, my Immaran assassin had become something of a best friend and a confidante. Sebastian kept secrets--collected them like they were precious gems--and reported back to me about all the things that went on throughout Coryth and the surrounding lands. We had amassed quite a lucrative collection of information. His presence and his expertise in spycraft, coupled with Cassie’s political superiority, had made it unnecessary to threaten anyone that stepped out of line with violence. All it took was the right rumor, the right secret, whispered at the right time...and people stepped right back into line. We spent an extraordinary amount of time together as a result.

And that was how I knew the secrets in _their_ lives--like how desperately Cassie wanted a child and how every time they’d tried, she’d lost it, including the one just three days prior to that very morning. Sebastian seemed indifferent to the idea, bending only to give her what she wanted. I’d asked him about it early in our friendship and he’d merely shrugged and explained that he didn’t have a mother or a father. He’d been raised, primarily, by the Guild, and prior to that he’d been little more than Rafael’s punching bag and not for the reasons that Vasilev whaled on Nikita. It wasn’t punishment. It had been for no other reason than _wanting_ to hurt someone and picking out the youngest, weakest of the bunch.

But Cassie wanted a baby and when Cassie wanted something, Sebastian gave it to her. Or, at least, he tried to. This was a failing experiment.

She rubbed her temples again in response. “Emory, a decision, please,” she pleaded.

I hesitated. As much as I hated to admit it, they were both right about Nikita. I hated him. Desperately and viciously...but I loved him. I would always love him, even two years removed and so far away. I could tolerate the world I lived in only because I knew that he was still living in it, too, and though I spitefully hoped he was bitterly miserable, I didn’t want him dead. I didn’t want him in the path of Remi Dumas’s invading army...over a bloody silver mine. 

And I didn’t want to fight a war. Not again. Not so soon after the last one, not with Atara chomping at the bit to go marching into the Vale like some messiah figure, hell bent on destroying the slave market from the ground up, even in Immara. “Sebastian,” I relented bitterly. “Make it quick. Make it clean. I don’t want it linked back to us.”

“It never is,” he pointed out. “I’ll see to it myself.” He paused and turned to Cass. “ _After_ , I get her back to bed.”

“I’m a grown woman, Sebastian, and need I remind you that I’m older than you?” she snapped when he approached, eyes flashing. Cass pushed herself to her feet, wincing in the process. This last one had been hard for her. She’d made it far--far enough that the pitiful little thing Tristan had pulled out of her could be held in her hand. I felt a pang of guilt when she started for the door, loose cotton gown gathered up in one hand around a stomach that was still distended from the remnants of pregnancy. She paused at the door, Sebastian’s arm around her back. “Emory,” she called back over her shoulder and shot me a disgusted look. “Your _whore_ has been asking for you.”

I rolled my eyes, but confirmed that I’d heard her and they both disappeared out the door. For a few more moments, I looked out over the city--sprawling and vast, barely a scar on her from the destruction of the siege. She felt like home again, at least, and I turned away to shed the royal garb I’d been parading around in, exchanging it for simple, common clothes and a hood that I pulled low over my face. 

Nicolette lived in the market district above a bakery in a richly furnished flat that I provided her with. That had been part of our original arrangement when I’d first sought her out--she slept with nobody else, but I made sure she wanted for nothing...and that was okay. It was right, even, because I’d long since decided I wasn’t keen on marrying any of the people who had thrown themselves at me. Any marriage I eventually involved myself in would be of convenience and Cassie had told me it would be optimal to wait until there was something I _absolutely_ needed before I picked a bride. That way, I could pick her as a pawn.

It felt unclean, the whole thing, but that was politics, she explained and Cyril had agreed. So I’d sought out Nicolette. I hadn’t sought her specifically, not really, but I’d been searching for something to fill the void Nikita left in my broken heart. Liquor didn’t quite cover it, though it dulled the ache most days. Sometimes the violence that ran in my blood couldn’t be slaked with enough bourbon to render me unconscious. I needed contact. Physical contact--someone to bend beneath me, to turn pliant and willing, to subjugate the way that I had done to him.

I hadn’t really known it until I saw her.

Nicolette was a Marsher with hair that burned red as fire, but it was her eyes that caught my attention. They were the same green as one of Nikita’s--verdant and vivid like new grass. She sold flowers in the market, a basket of roses tucked under arm. That was where I’d seen her first. She’d tried to hand me one and I’d stumbled, surprised when she grasped my wrist, and she’d seen under the hood I wore when I slipped out into the public to sit in the back of taverns and listen to my people talk so that I knew what they wanted most without the influence of their respective lords. I remembered the way her eyes had widened and how I’d pressed my fingers to her lips to silence her.

We’d spent three hours drinking ale in the back of one of those very taverns. We’d stumbled up into one of the rooms and when I’d asked her not to touch me, she’d listened, and our arrangement was born not long after that. 

We were friends. We were not in love. Nicolette didn’t want a life tied down with the gentry. She just wanted someone to take care of her. I didn’t want a wife, particularly one with no political sway to give me in a union. I just wanted someone to pin down when the nightmares couldn’t be silenced by bourbon. They couldn’t be silenced by her, either, and sometimes when I woke up in a cold sweat, grasping in the dark for a hard body littered with scars, she’d catch my hand and I’d _remember_. I’d remember that she was Nicolette, not Nikita, and that I loved her name because it reminded me of him and I loved her eyes because they reminded me of him.

I was sick and hopeless. She was healthy and hopeful. When I screamed in the dark, she would run her fingers through my sweat-slick hair and whisper against my ear. “It’s him, isn’t it?” And I never had to answer. She always just knew that my nightmares featured Kita...that they always started out normal. They started out real, just the memory of looking back over my shoulder and watching him standing on the edge of Ravndal. In reality, he’d turned around and walked away after a time but in my nightmares, I’d see that big, ancestral sword of his cut up through his chest like butter and burst through his sternum. I’d watch him sink into scarlet stained snow and I’d see Vasilev standing over him.

I hated that I still cared so much that these memories bothered me. I hated that I compared Nicolette to him--that I compared every woman who had ever made a pass at me to him. I hated that I even compared the men to him, though very few of them ever encroached on my personal boundaries. The court knew about the beach and I think, for the most part, most of the men that might have pressed their luck with me were deterred by that or by the fact that I could not provide an heir the way that my brother could.

I weaved through the streets of Coryth, acutely aware of Etienne following after me, clad in common clothes rather than armor. He had left the guard to serve under Sebastian. Blending in had become second nature to him and though I couldn’t see him, I could feel his eyes on me as we walked, entering the bakery through the back door and climbing up the flight of stairs to Nicolette’s rooms.

I never knocked. She’d laughed when I had the first time because I owned the building. I didn’t _have_ to knock. I had keys. I’d told her that I had no intention of invading her space and she’d rolled her eyes and told me that in the future, I could feel free to just walk in. She was abiding by our arrangement. There was no risk of me stumbling into something she didn’t want me to see.

I’d worried in the beginning of our relationship that nobody would ever be able to tolerate me and what I did, but Nicolette...she liked it.

"You're here early," she mused from a mountain of feather filled duvets and pillows when the door swung open. As her head emerged, she transformed from a riot of bouncing red curls to a heart shaped face with vivid, green eyes rimmed in smudged kohl makeup from the night before. She stretched her arms up, one at a time, holding a sheet up around her breasts like I hadn't seen her naked. There was a dusting of old bruises across her collar, like plum paint feathered over sun-kissed skin that had been white as ivory on the day she’d arrived from the Marshes.

I hummed a response and slid my hood off over my shoulders. Two years had passed and I still preferred red and black to slate, but the only evidence of it was the clasp that had held the cloak on. I had mourned long enough and drowning myself in self-pity was something I couldn't afford to do when my mental state was in a constant state of fragility. I'd gotten better...much better, according to Atara. Almost normal.

But who could really ever go back to normal after that?

Nicolette stood up, finally letting the sheet slip off of her body, revealing long, long legs and a wicked grin. She slipped a silk robe on, lifting her hair out of the collar with the sweep of her arm while I watched. “You’re enjoying this,” she accused me playfully.

A lop-sided smile crossed my face as I answered. "Nobody ever accused you of being ugly. A whore, yes. But ugly? Never."

"Whore is mild, Emory," she sighed almost dreamily, like she could imagine a hundred worse things to say. "Really though. I didn’t expect you this early. Shall we go to bed before we talk?" The suggestion on her face was nearly enough to have me doing that but my job didn't have off hours. It was my life. It consumed every waking moment of my day without strict oversight and there was strict oversight to be exercised that morning. There was a ball to plan--one that was held every year in celebration of the day that we'd thrown open the city gates and liberated Coryth from the Glenning usurper. In large part, it had become a celebration of...me. I still wasn't comfortable with crowds and Nikita had really been the only person that could touch me without warning me first. Regardless, I was only there because Cassie had said she asked for me.

So I shot her a smile. “Unfortunately, I can’t stay long. I’m only here because someone said you’d asked for me.”

“Someone?” Nicolette inquired. “One of Sebastian’s little birds?”

I snorted. Cassie wasn’t one of his birds, by far. She was more like his leash or, more accurately, his ball and chain. “Lady Brighton, actually,” I corrected.

Nicolette heaved a sigh and sat down at a vanity where she set to braiding her hair. “I only asked that someone tell you to stop by tonight,” she informed me curtly. “It wasn’t pressing.”

“Well, I’m here, Nicolette,” I drawled, lifting my arms to gesture to the room. “So where’s the fire?”

She fixed me with a disapproving look and I melted a little bit. It was sick on so many levels that I’d replaced Nikita with her and sicker still that she knew what I was doing and let me do it anyway. Mackenzie had laughed when I mentioned it like it all should have been obvious--it was obvious to him. He was a commoner though, or he’d been born a commoner, at least, and so while I saw myself as using Nicolette, she saw herself as gaining an advantage. A wealthy member of the nobility to look after her? It was an arrangement most girls in her position would have never even dreamed to hope for. 

“You may want to sit,” she offered, pointing to a chaise lounge across from her bed. Everything in her rooms was lavish--gold plated vanity, silk sheets and silk curtains, hand-carved furniture, and a plush, clamshell colored carpet. 

I declined the offer. “I’m good standing. If I sit, you might get the impression that I’m sticking around.”

Nicolette rolled her eyes. “Fine, have it your way,” she answered flatly, looking away from the mirror in her vanity when she finished braiding her hair, tying it securely with a cream-colored, satin ribbon. “I’m pregnant.”

There were few things in the world that could shock me at that point. I’d seen war and plague, death and torture. I’d held my father through his final breaths and cradled Lian, sticky and screaming, right after his birth. I’d been there when Cassie lost her first baby and she’d shrieked into my shoulder and bled all over my clothes through the agony of it while one of the staff ran for Tristan and Sebastian.

I’d been sleeping with Nicolette for nearly a year. Our arrangement had begun a mere few weeks after I’d returned south, hungry for a distraction. We’d never been particularly careful and I’d always imagined that if something happened, it happened. I was neither trying to have a child or avoiding having one, but I’d quietly come to terms with the fact that I probably couldn’t. It had happened so easily for Atara. Cassie had no problem _getting_ pregnant. Her problem was _staying_ pregnant. 

But Nicolette and I? We’d never had so much as a scare.

I felt my breath hitch and my eyes widen, surprise flooding my blood like adrenaline. “Truly?” I asked after a few heavy moments of suffocating silence during which she stared at me, waiting for a reaction.

“Really?” she asked flatly. “Do you really think I’d lie about this? You’re a _king_ , Emory. I could have assassins breathing down my back just for being seen in public with you.”

“And it...it’s mine?”

“Are you daft?” Nicolette snorted and swept to her feet. “Do you honestly think I don’t know Sebastian has one of his thugs watching this place? That if I so much as invited someone with a cock into this room--someone who isn’t _you_ or him--that they wouldn’t end up with an arrow between the eyes before morning or a slit throat on the way down the stairs? Yes, of course it’s _yours_ , Emory. I follow the rules.”

I’d wanted children so bad when I was younger, but being with Nikita had meant that I’d tabled a lot of that desire and it had never really rekindled. I poured all that affection into my nephew instead. I spent every possible moment that I had free with Atara and Mackenzie’s toddler, who could speak in full sentences by then and who toddled around on fat, wobbly legs, mimicking every adult in the vicinity. Lian was brilliant and bright and beautiful and I adored him, but I’d given up hope of having one of my own.

And all of that came rushing back like a dam had released in my chest. All at once, that fervent desire to be a father was roaring to life again and Nicolette watched me, suspicion on her delicate face, until I swept her up and squeezed so hard that I felt her spine pop and heard the breath leave her body. “Ugh, Emory!” she whined, kicking her legs when I lifted her feet from the ground and spun her. “Nausea! Nausea!”

She wobbled when I put her down, a bit green in her face, glaring at me like I was the world’s most despicable person in that moment. All that heartbreak I’d felt talking to Cassie and Sebastian about Nikita vacated me. I felt _joy_. I wanted to haul her up to the palace. I wanted to announce it to my family. I wanted Tristan to see her--to tell me what it was that grew in her because I fully intended to turn Atara’s old bedroom into the world’s most absurdly expensive nursery. 

“I’m not marrying you,” Nicolette tacked on flatly and I hardly cared. I kissed both of her cheeks and she made another revolted noise. “And I like it better when you bite.”

“Marry me, don’t marry me, I don’t care!” I exclaimed and I grasped both of her fingers. I had so many plans already, all of them rushing through my head too fast to make sense of. “I’ll send Tristan to see to your health.”

“I’m perfectly healthy,” she protested. “And Lady Brighton won’t appreciate you making news of this. She’ll be the one that has to quash the rumors.”

“Fuck the rumors,” I answered. “But you’re right. Of course. He’ll be discreet. You ought to move up to the Keep.”

Nicolette fixed me with a disapproving look. “Absolutely not,” she declined and I made a face, confusion twisting in my stomach like cold lead. “You’ll take a legitimate bride someday and have legitimate children. My child will only ever be your bastard. It’s best if he or she is kept separate.”

“I’ll legitimize it,” I dismissed her concern and she made a face that time.

“So that whatever bride you take can try to have my baby smothered in his or her sleep to make a path to the crown for hers? No, Emory,” Nicolette insisted. “I want to stay here. I want it to be separate. Be as involved as you like. Spoil it all you like, but don’t confuse us with your real family.”

“But it would be my real family!” I protested, frustration growing in the back of my throat, making my cheeks flush red. Cassie would agree with her, of course, and so did history. The Bordelon family had plenty of bastards kicking around the tree, but I was the only one to have ever been legitimized and that was only because Fox had always intended to marry Cyril. Things had just...gotten in the way first.

Nicolette took a deep breath. “We’ll talk about it when the time comes,” she eventually conceded, noting the irritation growing in my expression. “You...speak with Lady Brighton. Speak with the Grand Inquisitor. Speak with your brother and your father. Hear what they have to say about it. _Then_ decide what you want to do. Don’t make half-cocked decisions based on your heart. That only ever ends in disaster. Now are you coming to bed or are you leaving?”

"Unfortunately for me, I was born into this family, so I have actual royal things to do beyond playing human incubator for the monarchy's spawn," I answered dryly. She patted her stomach as if she was proud of the job she was doing. She should have been. _I_ was proud of it. "You don't actually want me here anyway, Nicolette. Let's just be honest about it: We prefer each other naked."

"Mmm," she scrunched her face up and then smiled. "Don't I know it, Emory Bordelon. I wasn't inviting you dressed though."

"You don't need to invite me at all," I drawled. "I'm the King. I take what I want." I leered at her for extra effect.

Nicolette licked her lips. "Come take what you want then, Emory," she crooned, lifting a hand so that she could crook a finger at me and beckon me toward her. "I do so love when you get bossy."

"Later." The assurance was met with a crestfallen face and Nicolette flopped backward into the bed. She kicked a pillow at me blindly and it went wide of the target, hit the dresser, and fell to the floor with a muffled, whooshing noise.

She huffed. "Get out then," the girl grumbled. "You'll just start talking if you're dressed and I don’t feel like talking about any of it right now."

The one positive in my relationship with Nicolette was our ability to be honest with each other. It didn't matter how much we goaded and teased each other, full disclosure had always been a top priority and while I didn't love her, I trusted her implicitly. My interests served her interests and as long as it stayed that way, we played for the same team.

I’d promised her in the beginning that she would never be forced to do anything she didn’t want to do and that I would never burden her with my company if she didn’t feel inclined to have it, so I merely leaned over the bed to kiss her cheek. “If you need anything,” I assured her. “Anything at all, Nicolette…”

“I know,” she promised. “I’ll see you tonight then?”

“Mm, if you want to see me tonight, yes.”

She batted at me playfully. “Of course, I do. Now, go. _Go_. You have more important things to do than me.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Nikita

The bitter, biting cold of the north chewed through leather and fur like it was nothing. I’d almost forgotten that in my time spent in the south…that the cold had teeth like a wolf. Teeth made for ripping, chewing, crunching down to the bone. My eyelashes were frosted with it, my lips were blue, my fingers, even gloved as they were, were frigid and numb and the bow that had been little more than a toy in the south felt clumsy in my hands, two years removed from the last time I’d seen Coryth.

I didn’t like admitting that I was out of practice. I didn’t like thinking that while I was in the south, letting Emory whip me raw, my people were here. Struggling. Starving. Being slowly choked out by the cold that stretched on endlessly for more than three quarters of the year, giving the inhabitants of the Glace mountain range just the briefest of respites in what the rest of Coria called the hottest months of the year. It never got hot at home above the Marshlands. It didn’t even get warm. It got tolerable.

By this time in the year though, all the deer had moved south beyond our borders. Any that remained were scraggly and thin, emaciated and peeling bark from the evergreens as they trudged toward the south just a little bit too late.

I had my eye on one that afternoon, hunkered down in snow that, had it not been packed, would have come up nearly to my waist but it was stamped down by weight and the frigid, frozen rain that sometimes came instead of the snow, turning everything from fluffy white into hard and unforgiving ice. 

As hard and unforgiving as Glacians.

I drew the arrow from the quiver at my hip, my breath a vaporous cloud in front of my face. Failure to bag this animal meant someone was going hungry soon. The winters in Glacia were long and hard, a constant uphill battle against starvation and the elements, and I’d forgotten how hard it was. I’d forgotten because my own life, in some ways, had been harder in the south. 

Harder to get out of bed in the morning when the sheets are sticking to dry blood on your back. Harder to keep going when someone you love is so intent on hurting you, so destroyed by his own demons that he can’t see yours, so broken that he doesn’t stop…won’t stop…can’t stop, even if you beg. 

So beautifully broken that I couldn’t leave either, even when he didn’t stop, not until the choice came down to him or my sisters. To love or family.

The arrow was loosed, sailing in a sharp, straight line, screaming across the frozen creek that rested between us and it missed the animal’s heart by a fraction of an inch because he lifted his head in that last moment and his body shifted just a quarter of a step forward. 

The deer wailed, furious and horrified, and bright, vivid scarlet sprayed in an arterial arch in the snow. 

Blood like what I’d mopped off of Emory’s arms after nightmares where he clawed himself to ribbons. Blood like what I’d rinsed from my back on those mornings that the sheets did stick to me and he was already gone, a mint and leather scented memory that tanged of metal and salt. Blood like that day in the dungeon when I’d been a butcher for him and again when I’d been his Commander.

A three days ride into the Witch Wood and a left along the brick wall to the metal gate. Emory Bordelon, the King’s oldest son.

Not mine anymore.

Blood in the snow, like the blood in the streets during the Battle for Coryth and how it had sprayed the same way, an arterial arch of beautiful, fatal red that matched the livid fury in my chest and the swelling ferocity that gnashed my teeth. 

Emory would suffer for what I’d done. Emory suffered for everything. His life had been one long march of horrors, each one taking a piece of him slightly larger than the last he’d lost and he took it. He gave himself away, piece by piece by piece, and then I’d cut the largest one out of him yet and I’d done it without any skill in butchering. I’d hacked into him like a novice on a hunt and carved his very heart out with a rusted blade.

I deserved to be horrified by the spurting blood in the snow, the rearing animal that was now suffering because of me, just like Emory was suffering because of me. I deserved to hurt. To be hungry. To be screaming inside, clawing at the inner surface of my skull because I could never be me here. Everything was a lie.

I’d thrown him away for lies.

I needed that deer though, screaming as it was, and I had to put away the nausea that roiled in my gut over it. Red. Blood. Red like Emory’s coat. Red like his mouth. Red like the heat that bloomed between his hips and left him sobbing into my gut, terrified and aching.

Red like the blood on my hands because if he failed to stand on his own two feet…if he went back to being what he had been…then I’d killed him. That was on me.

The deer kicked at the snow and stumbled forward, injured and wailing in a way that was reminiscent of a banshee. A death knell. A shrill, otherworldly scream that made the snow tremble from the trees as he thrashed to his feet and I drew the ax at my hip as he got up to run. To fumble. To crawl off somewhere and die and I didn’t have the patience, the energy, or the daylight to follow him nor did I have another arrow after the last six failed attempts that had sunken into the bark of trees too deep for removal.

I hurled the ax without thinking. Without hesitation. Just for the screaming to stop. For the red to stop spraying, spraying, spraying like I imagined it had poured from Emory’s broken body that night at the beach, like it had poured from Fox’s corpse, like it had dripped down my back…

Panic and anxiety welled up in my throat, scraping like claws in an effort to choke me out, and the ax hit the mark. The animal dropped with the weapon embedded in the back of the skull. He shuddered once, that massive, beautiful beast, and his bright eyes looked up at me, wild and terrified and pitifully broken…and then they dulled. Life left his mouth in a vapor-breath.

I hadn’t killed anything that didn’t deserve it in so long.

I was careful not to touch the blood, cringing around it as I gathered the deer by his antlers, looping rope through them so that I could drag him the three mile trek back to Ravndal where my father had been meeting with a Lord from the Marshlands about his red-haired daughter that they sought to marry off to me. I was stuck between two emotions, neither of which allowed me to care about impending nuptials. Rage and grief boiled through my blood like poison. I hated myself. I hated everything about me. Every scar on my body, from battle, from my father, and from Emory. I deserved to hurt. I wanted it. Pain had to be better than this never ending cycle of loathing and grieving for a man my family would never let me have, could never even stomach thinking about…

I walked in near silence, listening only to the soft scrape of the snow under the deer and the slow, aching throb of my broken heart. I’d marry the girl. She’d give me the children required of Glacians. I’d spend the rest of my life on the edge of insanity, slowly tearing myself apart, and hopefully…hopefully I’d die young. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be long before it wasn’t expected of me anymore…before the lying could stop. Before I could sit on the other side and wait for Emory, the way that he liked to think Fox waited for Cyril.

I heard Ravndal before I saw the black smoke smudging above the trees from the fire that always burned in the center of the village, a pitiful attempt at keeping people warm, but it allowed the younger kids to run around outside for a time, if they bundled up. It allowed the older people, those who could no longer hunt but were still domestically useful, to heat water for cooking or laundry or tanning. 

The deer left a scarlet trail past the marker where they buried my sister and one of the kids, not yet old enough to hunt but old enough to earn his keep, followed after me and scraped the red off the snow with a wooden shovel. There wasn’t much of it left. I’d drained what I could out in the forest, left it for scavengers. What was left in the gut of the animal would be added to smoked sausages or soup to get us through the coldest nights yet to come.

My work was solitary. That’s why I offered to do it and though it meant going into the barn, the very building where I’d found Milena swinging from the rafters, a frozen, blue-faced corpse as solid as an ice block after only a few hours and I’d still tried. 

I could still taste her mouth, metallic and bitter with bile and tears. My tears, because anyone but her. Anyone but her when I’d shared everything with her until then, even the womb that I’d come screaming out of just a few minutes before she did. 

I ignored it then, tying the wretched animal I’d dragged back up to the rafters by his back feet. I kicked a wooden bowl under him to drain the rest of his blood, watching with a numb, frozen expression while he swung there for the few minutes it took until I could cut him down. His body thunked against the dirt like Milena’s had, only he was still soft, and I set to skinning the rough, patchy hide from his emaciated body. He wouldn’t feed many, but every mouthful counted in the dead of winter.

“Nikki!” My father’s voice was incredibly loud. It echoed in my head, empty and drained of everything I had been, and bounced around between my ears. I didn’t rouse myself from my work where I was attempting to ignore the slick red on my hands as I cut and carved and peeled. Flayed. I was flaying. Almost like what I’d let Emory do to me. Because everything I’d ever been before this very moment in time was tied to him, tied on him, and I’d sent him south without me with frigid tears on his beautiful, heartbroken face.

Vasilev clapped me on the shoulder, his hand spanning the entire width of it, large and calloused and wind-burned. I wanted to jerk away from him. I wanted to scream at him. I hated him because everything I’d given up had been to save his name. To save the names of my sisters and my mother. To spare him punishing me the way that I knew he would have to as my father and my lord.

He surveyed the creature beneath my hands and beamed. "It takes an excellent tracker to find game in the woods this time of year,“ he said proudly, like the words should have been a compliment but they tasted like ashes in my mouth. He hadn’t yet noticed the change in my behavior…the sudden withdrawal I had from anything that included social functions. My mother had, but my father was one of those happily oblivious people who, despite hearing rumors of my relationship with the Crown Prince, chose to blissfully ignore them.

I made another cut and he kept talking while I stripped hide down over the head of the wretched corpse between us. "I came to an agreement with Penelope’s father,” he boasted. "As soon as the ice melts, she’ll come north and we’ll marry the two of you. You’ll take over my duties as Lord and Danica will stay on as emissary in the south.“

I was numb. I heard the door open and felt the presence of my mother. She knew. She was the only one that knew and since Emory had left, unexpectedly and in a flurry of tears he hid from everyone but me, she’d told me what a fool I was…that if I loved him the way that I said I loved him, then I had to be a special kind of idiot to walk away from him.

She didn’t know how badly Emory had hurt me. She chalked up my scars to more left behind from my father, just like almost everyone else did. She didn’t need to know, though. It changed nothing. The Emory that had hurt me was not the Emory that I loved. That was a disease, a sickness born of trauma that had blackened his mind and it had been over. He’d promised and he’d kept that promise. I hadn’t kept mine.

"You’ll have knee high whelps in no time,” my father laughed, practically crowing, and I flinched at the idea.

I’d never touched a woman. Hadn’t so much as thought about it. Didn’t want to now.

“I don’t love her,” I pointed out blandly and Vasilev gave my shoulder a shake as I stripped away the last of the hide and handed the knife off to my mother, who was a better butcher than I ever had been and who wore a skein of skinned rabbits at her belt. She was dressed much the same as me, even sported the familiar tattoos around her wrist, though not those of a Commander like I did. She could never be that, not when she’d been born a Marsher.

My father scoffed, still giddy. "You don’t need to love her to get a child on her, boy. Love takes time. I didn’t love your mother at first, either, and we’re happy now. You’ll be happy.“

Eerika’s eyes lifted, summer green, and they locked on mine like she could silently urge me: Tell him. Tell him now and run. Don’t ever look back, Nikita. Don’t ever come back to this wretched place. Go out and live and love the life that Emory wanted to give you.

That was what she’d told me the first night he was gone when she’d woken up in the middle of the night to find me sleepless and aching. Now it was silent, but the words echoed in my head and then my eyes flickered up to the rafters, to where I could almost see Milena still hanging there, and my mother’s followed mine.

I thought: I’d rather join you than spend the rest of my life with a woman I can never love. At least I loved you.

And I remembered Emory and that afternoon he’d told me how badly he wanted to die. He’d promised not to do it...promised he would never put me through that and he’d kept his end of that deal.

What a hypocrite I would be if I followed Milena and he would know. Mother, at least, would write to him, because she would feel like he deserved to know that I was dead. I could only imagine the white-hot fury with which he would curse my name and how ready and willing he would be to raze the north to the ground for their backwards ideas and customs, how quickly he would slaughter my father for being the person that put these ideas in my head.

"He won’t be,” she voiced for me, her eyes turning cold and stony as we stared each other down again. I willed her to shut up and her brow furrowed. "Nikita, tell him.“

"Shut up,” I hissed the words through clenched teeth and my father waved a dismissive arm at my mother. 

“She doesn’t know anything,” he babbled, rolling his eyes. "She’s a silly little Marsher with frivolous ideas in her head.“

My mother’s jaw worked overtime, clenching and unclenching, her eyes bright and burning from within. She’d told me she kept imagining me in the south with my sister. She’d see Emory frequently. She’d be the mother to his cousins. Family. She’d be a Bordelon and I’d remain a Novak, exiled to this wasteland, trapped in a web of wretched lies that I’d spun myself and in that moment, in that briefest second, I almost felt Milena spider-walk her fingers up my spine and lean in to whisper, ‘Tell him,’ the same way that Eerika had. 'Don’t spend your life like this. Don’t waste yourself. After all you’ve done…all you’ve been through, Nikki, you deserve to be happy.’

"No,” the word came out of my mouth in a clipped, frigid tone and I turned to face my father, my cheeks red and my teeth grinding in furious, livid anger. All that I’d lost…all that I’d given up…for this loveless existence in a land that wasn’t made for the living, in a place where bones outnumbered beating hearts, and even the ocean wore a frigid sheen of ice…this was not home. This was not worth me dying. This was not worth Emory’s broken heart.

My father stared at me. "No, what?” he asked, teeth together in a snarl. “Are you defying me, boy?”

“No, I won’t marry Penelope,” I bit out and his eyes widened, shocking blue, and he stared at me like I’d grown another head. "No, I won’t father children. No, I won’t be Lord of the North. No, I won’t love her, Father, because I can’t love her. I can’t ever love her because I love someone else.“

Vasilev looked like I’d slapped him and my mother stood up from the chair she’d taken at the butchering block to work on her rabbits and the deer. The blade was gripped tightly in her palm, her breath caught in her throat…I knew because no vapor pooled in front of her face. She was still as glass. "Who?” my father demanded. "Is she a suitable match?“ He looked ready to hit me. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d wrestled me to the dirt and taken a bull whip to me. The north was an unforgiving mother and one step out of line, one mistake, could cost you your life. Children were handled swiftly and without mercy. Vasilev took to that school of thought with glee.

It was no wonder I could take a beating from Emory the way that I could. I’d been taking them for twenty-two years.

"He,” I corrected sharply and his eyes narrowed to pinpricks of livid blue. "He is the King. It has always been a he, Father, always. It always will be and this miserable, pitiful, frozen wasteland isn’t worth me looking up into these rafters and thinking Milena had it easy! She got to die! I have to fucking live here!“

The backhand was swift and ferocious and entirely unexpected. So unexpected that my mother’s scream rattled my bones before the tang of blood filled my mouth from my new position sprawled on the floor of the barn. I’d known we’d come to blows over this, but I’d thought...a punch, a whip...not a backhand. My ears were ringing and I was so disoriented from the blow that the pain took another minute to settle in, throbbing down my face from my temple to my shoulder. My father was easily more than twice my weight and more than a foot taller than me. He hadn’t held back. I could feel it in the concussive confusion that rattled me afterward, like I couldn’t clear fog from my mind while I tried to push myself up from my knees.

My father was not a kind man. He was raised by an unkind world in a brutal culture, brought up to believe that every person of reproductive age should have been actively reproducing to make up for the horrifying rate of infant mortality in our frigid, frozen home. To him, I was actively spitting in the face of everything he’d ever learned. I was refusing to help carry on our people, his bloodline, my family…to him, this was merited. To almost every father in the village, it was merited.

But my mother was a Marsher and when he dragged me out of the barn, kicking and spitting like a wounded animal, bleeding from my mouth and clawing at the hand that held me by the back of my collar, she looked ready to hit him herself.

"You take your hands off of him! What have you done to his face?” Everyone in the vicinity stopped and he threw me like a sack of potatoes so that I rolled over hard packed snow and gravel that cut into my hands, which had been gloveless since I’d started skinning. 

I couldn’t breathe at first. The world tipped dangerously to one side when I tried to push myself up, coughing and spitting great mouthfuls of saliva thickened with blood. My mother reached for me and was hauled backward by my father with a brutal wrench of her arm. It enraged me and I scrambled, dizzy and fighting the urge to vomit that came with a concussion, to my feet where I swayed unsteady and vibrating with rage. 

“You want to hit someone,” I snarled. "You hit me. I did this. I did it. Every fucking rumor you heard out of the south was true, you miserable–“ 

My mother cut me off, stepping between me and Vasilev as my father got ready to give me the whipping of a lifetime. I doubted even Emory could live up to the ferocity I saw in his face. "Shut your mouth, Nikita Novak, or I will shut it for you,” she snapped, looking at me through a tangle of red hair. "We can talk about this. We can come to some agreement.“

"There is no agreement!” I shouted over her and she whirled to face me, her eyes a brilliant green just a shade off from Fox’s. 

I remembered them dead, staring up at me, glassly and lifeless and slack. 

I threw up. In that instant, in that small breath, it all became too much and the tears spilled over with the vomit, blood laced and mostly bile, that came hissing into the snow in a steaming puddle that smelled of the liquor I used to keep me sleeping through the night now. Without it, I woke up to Atara’s screaming, to Emory’s bloody handprints on the wall. I hadn’t been hit this good since Emory himself had knocked one of my molars out and, had he not succeeded in it, I thought my father probably would have that day.

I took a step, sideways and lurching and incapable of balance, but still maintaining solid footing on the ground. I would not get on my knees for this. I would not take this lying down. If he was going to beat me, he was going to fight for it, but he was going to fucking listen to me first because enraged was a sorry understatement for what I was. I was emanating fury. It radiated off of me in a corona of heat that threatened to melt the snow around me. 

I gathered my resolve, courage beating in my chest like it had recently recovered from broken wings, and I didn’t care who was looking at us. I didn’t care who heard. "You left me in the south as your emissary,“ I slurred through blood and tears, wiping my face with the back of my arm, leaving a streak of scarlet on leather and fur. "You were there while it was happening. You heard the rumors that he beat me. That he fucked me. That I allowed it. I more than allowed it. I reveled in it and you left me there anyway and I fell in love. I fell in love with someone broken and hurting and a little bit used but he _loves_ me. When I risked my life to break that siege, you didn’t come for me, Father. You didn’t help. You didn’t slaughter your way through an army with me. Emory did. Emory tore those walls down and saved those people. Emory saved every person in this fucking country and you all sit up here looking down at him because of what he is. Because of what happened to him.”

I was breathless, sobbing, radiant in my fury and my rage. It fueled me like oil on flame and I didn’t care how red his face turned. I didn’t care how wide my mother’s eyes got or how triumphant she looked, her wrist already bruising. I cared about Emory. I cared that he’d begged me not to stay and I’d failed to listen. I cared that he’d entrusted me with his heart between my teeth and I’d chewed it ragged like a dog on a bone.

I could fix it. I could go back to him. I could prove to him that I had been wrong and that I would never, ever let anything or anyone come between us again because without him, my world lacked the air I needed to breathe. Without him, I was just an empty shell of the person I’d come to be in the south. I loved him. I missed him. I missed his family…his family who had become my family, who had taken me in and treated me like one of their own.

I missed Atara. I missed Sebastian. I missed Mackenzie and Tristan and even Cyril.

I missed Emory. I missed him so much it was a physical pain that throbbed in my chest and nobody…nobody…was going to stop me from going south.

“It’s wrong,” Vasilev snarled. "You belong with a woman who can give you children.“

"It’s not wrong,” my mother spat. "Emory is an Infinito. He can give Nikita children.“

"That boy is a broken doll,” he responded with. "It’s a wonder they gave the crown to him instead of his brother. He was half-mad when I was there, snarling like a dog at anyone that dared try to touch him. Fox would be–“

"You don’t get to say his name,” I growled out through bitterly clenched teeth. "Not when you didn’t answer the call fast enough. Not when your Riders could have saved his life and Emory didn’t say a godsdamn word to you about it. He didn’t hold you accountable. He didn’t punish the north the way that he could have and Fox would be proud of what he’s done and what he went through to get here. You don’t know them like I do.“

My father sneered. "Obviously not. He can’t bear children, can he, Nikki? Go ahead. Tell them all. You’ve confirmed half the story already.”

My head was spinning and I picked up my bow where it had fallen from my shoulder, stumbling toward the house with my mother still firmly between me and my father. "Go fuck yourself,“ I snapped through bloodied lips. 

He stepped past her then, pushing Eerika aside so that she nearly tripped and my sister Anja caught our mother before she landed in the ice. I heard my father’s footfalls behind me, felt his meaty fist on the back of my neck, digging into my collar, and then he threw me against the side of our lodge. The snow shook from the roof as the breath left my body in an aching gasp and I glowered up at him, struggling against a grip that had twice my weight behind it and I was out of shape. I had been since the south and the past year had been particularly hard on me. I’d failed to adjust to life in the north again. I was underweight, peaked and thin. He took advantage of that.

"You are not going south,” he snarled. "You’re staying here. You’re marrying Penelope. You’re forgetting that pretty boy that kept you on a leash in the south and if I have to break your legs to keep you here, Nikita, I will.“

My mother protested, pulling on his arm, shrieking her dissent as she beat his bicep with small fists. She was a beautiful, tough woman who had adapted to our way of life but there was a piece of her that would always be a Marsher. Not quite northern, not quite born with vicious malice in her blood like we were, but not southern either. There was a bite to her, a livid ferocity that spoke to the survival skills it took to be a Marsher in their land that grew nothing but rice and was plagued with waterborne disease. 

She would never go down without swinging.

I bared my teeth at him, still dripping blood, and I narrowed my swimming eyes. "Then kill me,” I hissed through a tightly clenched jaw, practically spitting blood into his face. "Kill me, Vasilev, because I won’t marry that girl. I won’t father any children. I won’t contribute any more lives to this backwards fucking culture and if I don’t have anything to give, then I’m useless and if I were anyone else, you’d take me out in the woods and you’d slit my throat.“

My mother broke into panicked sobbing, pulling and jerking on his arm. "Don’t you dare, don’t you dare! You let him go, right now, or I swear, I’ll fucking kill you for this!”

My sister was the voice of reason though. "If you kill him, I’ll write to Emory Bordelon. I’ll tell him why you did it. Danica has written to me about the new king. He’ll burn Coria to the ground to avenge what you do here and even that won’t be enough.“

And I knew, deep in the recesses of my heart, that she was right. It was one thing for me to be here, alive but away from him. It was okay, as long as I was breathing. If Emory knew that Vasilev gutted me because of him….

"You’ll turn a good king into a monster,” I breathed. "Over me. I’m not worth all of Ravndal. I’m not worth all of these people. Let me go south.“

He didn’t get a chance to answer. My mother, spurred by his lack of reaction and the frigid look on his face, the hand on my throat, and my sister’s words, was driven to some end that I hadn’t ever expected from her. I heard the tang of steel leaving a scabbard and then the sharp tip of the sword that usually hung at my hip was pressed to the hollow of my father’s throat.

"Let him go,” she whispered dangerously. "I love you, Vasilev, but if you make me pick between you and my baby, I will pick him. I should have picked Milena and I didn’t, but I won’t make that mistake twice. I will always pick him. I didn’t spend twenty years fighting to keep him alive in this frozen wasteland to watch you kill him, too. You have another heir. Let Nikita go back to Emory.“

The grip at my collar grew slack for a moment and then, very gradually, my father backed away and let me go. "You have one day,” he warned gravely. "One day’s head start before my Riders hunt you down and they will bring you back whole and you can behave the way a northman should behave, or they can bring you back in pieces and we can bury you with your sister…but they will bring you back, Nikita. How is your choice.“

And he was gone. 

My mother threw my sword at my feet and fixed me with a look so frightening and so powerful that I held my breath until she pressed a kiss to the corner of my bleeding mouth, my face between her hands. "You don’t look back,” she whispered against my cheek. "You take your horse and you ride until her heart gives out and you never, ever look back here, Nikita.“

I did just that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this had enough Nikita angst to tide everyone over. Atara or Mackenzie will be up next <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Atara

The map of Immara that was spread out in front of me was probably the smallest of my worries, given the news my brother had decided to throw at my feet that morning. _Pregnant_ , and he’d said it with such glee--like I should have been _thrilled_ that he’d knocked up some girl he’d turned into a personal whore. All I’d been able to really do was feign some congratulatory words that stuck in my jaw like food that I couldn’t swallow. It had taken _work_ to get my throat to cough those words up. I had to keep reminding myself that Cassie would deal with it. I was not his Second. It wasn’t my job to give him advice in anything except that which pertained to me being his family.

So I’d swallowed the many, _many_ ‘What the fuck were you thinkings’ that wanted to bubble out of my mouth and I’d focused on the fact that he was getting something he’d wanted--something we’d all imagined he could never have. I focused on the fact that at nine o’clock in the morning, he was not yet into a bottle of wine or, better yet, bourbon, and drinking had become Emory’s go-to problem solver since Nikita Novak opted to remain in the north. If push came to shove, I would tell him what I really thought, but hadn’t yet asked and Cassie hadn’t yet approached me about it.

And therefore I remained silent. I had my own people to lead, my own Nation to worry over. Where my brother chose to stick his dick wasn’t my problem anymore.

It was cynical of me to think the way that I did then, but I hadn’t been the same since my stint in the dungeons. The whole Keep felt claustrophobic to me despite the enormity of it. At any given moment, I imagined the walls pressing in. I imagined the dark and the mildew and rot smell that I had never been able to forget. It was like it clung to me, though Mackenzie fervently claimed that it didn’t--that I still smelled like lavender tea and parchment paper, but that was lost on me every moment of every day except in the late evenings when Lian would climb into my lap, groggy and ready for bed, and I would tell him stories until he nodded off with his thumb in his mouth. 

I _needed_ to leave Coryth. It was an omnipresent, crushing knowledge that pervaded every one of my thoughts in the years following the siege. Lian and Mackenzie became the only uplifting parts of my life, but I stayed. I stayed because there were still times when I looked at Emory and I could tell that he was hurting. His eyes would turn a little distant, he’d shift his weight from one foot to the other, and one of his arms would cross his body to hold the other just above the elbow and I _knew_ then. I saw it every time some highborn lady fanned herself and batted her eyes, every time she grasped his leg under the table, just above his knee, and every time he saw Danica or Riordan--like Nikita’s younger sister was a living, breathing reminder of everything he’d left behind in Ravndal.

He never talked about it, not after that first day he’d been back. It was like he’d cleaned every piece of evidence that Nikita Novak had ever existed out of his life--like it was just normal spring cleaning and all those memories went out with the cobwebs and the old carpets. I never again saw that ancient Glacian crown he’d worn into battle. He wore sleeves to hide the tattoos he’d gotten in the north. All correspondence with the Novak family went through Cassie or Sebastian and never touched his hands.

Emory had compartmentalized and sectioned Nikita off into a segment of his mind that he kept sealed. 

And that was fine, really, because whenever I thought about the Rider Commander, I wanted to ride north and burn Ravndal to the ground with him in it. I’d lost Emory once to trauma. I lost him again to liquor and though he proved to be a more than proficient monarch--a monarch that the people adored--his demons hounded him in ways not even that dopey dog could help with.

I drummed my fingers on the map, banishing the thought of my brother while my eyes flickered down to the child on the floor, blissfully unaware of how furious I really was. He built a tower of blocks covered in painted letters and flowers and when the tower got too high to stack, he kicked it over and started again. Mackenzie was nearby, trying to get him to arrange the blocks so that they spelled his name, but Lian was absolutely not interested in learning anything that didn’t include a paintbrush. 

“It starts with an L,” Mack insisted, holding the block out to him. “What comes next?”

“No,” Lian refused adamantly, his slate colored eyes squinted in defiance. Insistence on Lian’s part always came next and I knew the next word out of his mouth before he even said it, but he _did_ say it. “Mine. You _leave_ , Daddy.”

I snorted, turning back to the map when Mackenzie sighed. “He told you,” I mumbled more to myself than to Mack, but I heard him stand and his hand cracked against my backside a moment later in a smarting slap that made me yelp and turn a glare on him--the very same expression Lian had been wearing a moment ago. _He_ was content without Mackenzie, though, happily rebuilding his doomed tower.

Across the room, Ridley stretched in a windowsill, a book in his lap, and Tristan looked up from the journal he was scribbling in. He wanted to document every moment of Lian’s life in some effort to understand my family line. He was full of questions, too--were we all that defiant (I’d said no, Mackenzie and Cyril both said yes), how fast did we grow (slower, apparently, than humans), how much keener were our senses (more than doubled, according to Tristan’s research), and a variety of other things he had not yet learned the answers to. 

“Tell me again,” I asked when Ridley made his way over to my table of maps. I wasn’t looking at him, but I knew he was rolling his eyes and I heard his book land somewhere to my left. Mackenzie snatched it before Lian could turn it into the foundation of a new tower.

The former slave’s fingers landed on the map. “Idra’s Vale,” he informed me, pointing to a plotted out city tucked inside a semi-circular ring of mountains. His fingers walked to a swamp on a delta and stopped at a small town. “Redwater.” They moved then to a great, sweeping area of forest, then an area of grasslands, a large lake, and the sea, and with each place, he assigned names. “Amaranthium. Coravacus, Villantia, Karinus.” He stopped and then smoothed his fingers far, far, far up the map across a swath of desert as wide as the Marshlands themselves. He stopped at the edge of a mountain range. “Desert’s Edge.” Then his fingers stepped up, landing directly between two of the massive mountains. “Paikea.”

“What is the desert called?”

“The Sea of Snakes,” Tristan supplied from his spot by the window. “According to legend, it used to be a great, inland sea that connected to the ocean during the wet season. There are supposedly fossilized skeletons of the northern sea snakes buried somewhere in the dunes. I’ve never seen them though.”

“And that’s where this...lost tribe is supposed to be?”

Ridley nodded. “I looked when I was searching for Sebastian, though. I didn’t find any evidence of there being survivors out in that desert. It goes years without raining there.”

That wasn’t my concern. It was a curiosity of mine, sure, but my focus was not the desert or the people that might have been living in it. My focus was on the people that were living in the great city-states of Immara. My people. _Chained_ people. The more I’d spoken with Ridley in the past two years, the more convinced I’d become that I had to do something. I’d been imprisoned. I’d worn a collar every time they took me up to torture me while Mackenzie watched and that alone had been unbearable. Hearing what Ridley had to say...what some of the gentry in Immara _did_ and how they treated anyone with Lierian blood in their veins….

I’d believed, once upon a time, that what had been done to Mackenzie was a showcase of the depths of human depravity. There were still nights he woke up but wasn’t really awake, staring into the dark with unfocused eyes, reliving the most horrific moments of his life and there was _nothing_ I could do to help him.

Ridley had those nights, Tristan had told me. Only Ridley’s body looked like a map of scars the way that Nikita’s had and he carried that same web of mutilated tissue over his back that my father had once worn. He was deaf on one side, I’d learned, a result of a beating gone too far, and his insides were a terrible mess that I couldn’t see, but I could hear about--about how his kidneys didn’t operate at full functionality, that even if Tristan hadn’t been asexual and thus utterly uninterested in the physical, Ridley was too broken to really enjoy it regardless of the position he filled. He’d been beaten, raped, bred, tormented, tortured, and experimented on--and he still wore a grin every time he talked to me. He was one of those rare individuals who could truly experience joy just by making the other people around him happy.

“And our people...they’re all slaves there?” Mackenzie inquired quietly, looking down at the marker that plucked out the Vale.

Tristan hummed. “Most,” he answered and Ridley shrugged in agreement. “There are a few exceptions, like Caius Erucius. There’s a merchant in Amaranthium that’s a halfling. He was a slave though. His master’s favorite pet and when the old man died with no heir, his will dictated that his slave be freed and allowed to inherit it. Most slaves, however, are actually human.”

“Because there aren’t many pureblooded Lierians alive in Immara. The female birth rate has had quite a negative impact on the population. That’s how you get mixes like me,” Ridley explained. “My grandfather was a Lierian. He was taken to the stock stables and bred with a human female. That produced a female offspring--a halfling--who was further bred with a human male to get _me_.”

Mack huffed. “Bred,” he repeated flatly. “Like fucking stock horses.”

“Stock horses are treated better,” Ridley said, his voice dry, and I felt that familiar flush of fury rise up my spine and spread into my stomach where it quickly turned into revulsion. “The purebloods are coveted. You’ll really only find them in Imperial Courts, with the exception of Laurien Perondale’s. He doesn’t keep bed slaves. It has...fallen out of favor in Karinus. When they started courting Coria for trade, they had to adapt or risk driving your people out.”

“Fallen out of favor,” Tristan mimicked, disgusted. “Like they’re fashion accessories.”

“Alchemists are fashion accessories,” Ridley corrected. “Lierians are pets and the purebloods live like royalty. The halflings, if they look like Mackenzie, are usually coveted almost as much because they look _almost_ pure. Quadroons like me though…” He laughed shortly. “We populate the brothels, mostly, and the poorer merchants, lesser gentry. When we reach the end of our...shelf life...we’re generally sold off to cheap brothels where some sadistic little lordling will pay double what we’re worth to be allowed to do whatever he wants to us. That generally includes murder. That’s where I would have ended up if Tristan hadn’t found out I could read.”

Tristan made a face, nose wrinkled, and pinched the back of his neck. They were affectionate--almost nauseatingly so. Ridley liked to be coddled and held, treated more like a precious doll than a person, but I could hardly blame him for it. He’d been used up and spit out over and over so many times that being pampered and adored must have seemed like some kind of nirvana to him. 

“And which of the city-states would be easiest to take?” I inquired, looking up at both of them. Tristan’s eyes clouded and Ridley shifted. Mackenzie shot me a look. This was a discussion for my council, technically. It was a decision that I would need their approval for, but I was hungry for revolution...for a win...for an _escape_ from Coryth. Compared to the hell that had been the Keep, even Immara looked good to me.

Ridley cleared his throat. “Technically, Karinus, but they’re officially allied with your brother. If you attack Laurien Perondale’s city, you attack Emory.”

“They have the largest slave stable in Immara,” I reminded him curtly and my eyes turned to Tristan, who looked pointedly down at the table. Rafael Brighton owned that stable and by then, I’d heard horror stories that made Vasilev Novak look like a fucking saint in comparison to the literal monster that had raised Sebastian and Tristan. At least Vasilev was predictable, from all I’d heard. His beatings were punishments. There was a code that he adhered to. With the death of Helena, Rafael had turned into a sadist. Tristan said he’d fled before it got too bad, but Sebastian talked about being forced to beat unruly slaves well beyond the point of death and then blamed for the profit loss, about being beaten unconscious simply because Rafael had been drunk and Sebastian had been _there_....

I didn’t understand Immarans. More importantly, I didn’t understand people like Vasilev and Rafael, because when I looked at Lian and thought about that, a part of me rebelled so vehemently against it that I knew, even if he’d done the most heinous thing, I could never, _ever_ hurt him. Sometimes, when Sebastian talked, I’d go directly from that conversation to find my boy just so that I could breathe in the tea and honey smell that lingered in his hair and feel him wriggle in my grasp, annoyed at being disturbed and coddled.

“Aside from Karinus,” Tristan went on, ignoring what I’d pointed out. “Coravacus or Villantia. Amaranthium is surrounded by thick forest. You can march along the Imperial Highway to get there, but they’ll see you coming and be ready to answer. The alchemist that serves their King is called Hallee. She’s what we call an elemental.”

I looked up, quirking an eyebrow in question, and Tristan heaved a sigh.

He scrubbed his fingers through his hair before he answered. “I’m a healer,” he explained. “I fix people. My magic can’t be used to harm. Only to heal and to protect. Caius is a necromancer. All of us draw our power from the dead, but he manipulates them. His magic feeds on the energy that separates our world from theirs. It kills. Hallee is an elemental. She...makes fire, freezes water--”

“Caius can freeze water,” Mackenzie pointed out. “So can you.”

“We can’t freeze the water in the very air around us,” Tristan deadpanned. “We can’t freeze entire lakes or conjure fire that falls from the sky. Hallee can. Amaranthium will be...problematic.”

“And the alchemists that serve Coravacus and Villantia?” Ridley inquired. “Is that Lorelai and Alastor?”

Tristan hummed in agreement. “Lorelai is a naturalist--she can make things grow, convene with some animals, cause earthquakes...but she’s almost as young as I am and age relates directly to power. She won’t be much of a threat. Alastor, however, is what we call a mystic and he’s almost as old as Caius. He’s from the second or third class that Caius inducted into the College and the only one that survived his covenant.”

“This is all too fu--” Mack started and corrected himself, glancing down at Lian. “Weird. It’s too weird.” He sat back down with the baby and Lian’s face colored pink, his lips in a pout as the blocks were arranged to spell his name again.

“What is a mystic?” I asked, exasperated. 

Ridley snorted. “It’s Caius in reverse. Caius destroys. Alastor creates.”

“So he’s a god,” I said flatly.

“About as close as you can get to one,” Tristan admitted sheepishly. “On the upside, it also means he _can’t_ destroy life. Buildings, weapons, other people’s magic--yes, but he can’t directly kill. He can, however...create a golem out of mud and send it to kill. Fortunately, I don’t think you’ll have to fight him. Alastor and Caius are good friends. I always thought Alastor had a bit of an infatuation with him, to be totally honest, but Caius is…”

Ridley chuckled. “Very fond of tits?” he suggested.

“Language,” I warned gently, nodding to the boy on the floor, who was still adamantly refusing to spell his name in blocks. 

“Either way,” Mackenzie finally said, giving up again. Lian toddled to his feet and made his way over to a chest of toys. He dragged a doll out from the bottom, missing half of her hair as a result of him dragging her too close to the fireplace (we’d tried to replace her--he was not having it.) We both watched him as he sat down with her and began building the blocks around her like a sort of cage while Mack continued. “You can’t launch a full scale invasion on Immara without Emory’s support and Emory isn’t interested in war. Especially now, which, by the way, are we going to talk about that? Is _anyone_ going to mention the elephant in the room?”

We all knew. Of course, we did. Emory had told Mackenzie and I that morning when we’d had breakfast with him. He’d likely also told Sebastian and Cassie. Tristan, I imagined, had known before all of us and been sent to handle the girl’s health, which meant that Ridley knew because Ridley knew everything that Tristan knew. They were practically one person. 

Ridley rocked on his heels. “What is there to mention?” he asked, tucking a chestnut curl behind his ear. “In typical royal fashion, the king will have a bastard. That’s just politics.”

“It’s more than politics,” Tristan pointed out. “It’s a _problem_. He would be wise to take that child from her and get rid of the girl. Send it away. Let some poor merchant with a barren wife adopt it under the pretense that he never tells anyone who it is. Better yet, don’t tell the merchant who it is. Have one of Sebastian’s people drop the child off. No name, no history. Nothing. That way it can’t challenge a legitimate heir, it can’t raise an army, it can’t come back to bite him in the ass.”

“Or you,” Ridley added carefully, looking at me with seawater green eyes. He turned his head so that his right ear was angled toward me to hear better. “Bastard or no, that child will carry Infinito blood. It won’t present a challenge just to whatever offspring Emory legitimately fathers, but to Lian, as well. If the wrong faction of Lierians got their hands on that baby…” He shrugged. “In Immara, they would put it in a canvas sack and throw it out to sea.”

Mack made a noise, disgusted. “This isn’t Immara. We don’t make it a habit of murdering babies.”

Tristan winced. “So you’d save one child and risk the lives of thousands if that mis-bred whelp decides to raise an army. Cold as it may be, forcing the girl to drink tansy may be the most humane way to deal with it.”

“Unless Emory doesn’t marry,” I pointed out. “He could legitimize this child and just...not have any others. Then it’s no threat, right? It would already be his heir.”

“Cassie has specific plans for Emory’s future,” Mackenzie reminded me, arms crossed, his eyes on Lian. “They definitely include marriage. He’s obviously not sterile, so that probably means children.”

I stared down at the boy on the floor, building a little door for his doll in the block castle he was painstakingly crafting. I’d never loved anyone or anything as fiercely as I loved Lian. There wasn’t a line I wouldn’t cross to keep him safe and when I looked at him, I didn’t have to think about it. If the choice came down to my brother’s bastard or Lian, I would throw that infant in a canvas sack and toss it overboard like Ridley had said they did in Immara. I didn’t care how vehemently Emory would love it. I didn’t care how much he’d always wanted this...Lian was mine. He was _mine_ and I would butcher, steal, lie, murder, and manipulate to keep him safe, even if it meant crossing my own family.

“I’ll deal with it,” I eventually said quietly. “I’ll tell Emory he needs to do something about the situation. It can’t be allowed to remain the way that it is. He probably hasn’t put much thought into it.”

“I doubt Cassie has either,” Tristan offered, his voice weak. “She’s...not well after this last miscarriage. It took a lot out of her. Out of her _and_ Sebastian, though my brother would never admit it. The last thing either of them are likely to want to think about is Emory having a child. I’ll speak with them, see if I can’t get a handle on what they intend to do.”

“To do?” Mack asked, arching an eyebrow. “You can’t possibly think Sebastian would act without orders.”

“Of his own volition, no,” Ridley answered with a shrug. “But if Cassie ordered him to? Absolutely. What’s one more kill?”

I almost laughed. It wasn’t funny, but in the two years since the Keep, I had weeded out faction after faction of Lierians that had united under Hiram. I had seen countless people on the gallows. I’d taken heads myself. 

So really...what was one more kill?


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Mackenzie

There was a darkness in Atara after the siege that I didn’t recognize--a sort of insidious fear that bled into everything he did and commanded every decision he made. He called the Keep a prison...said that the only reason he stayed was because he worried over Emory’s stability in the wake of Nikita’s departure...but the real prison was the crippling terror he allowed to live inside his head. He avoided public functions, spent time only with his inner circle, and obsessed over the slave plight in Immara as a distraction from the growing realization that _this_ was his life now and he’d allowed it to become a cyclic march of anguished fears. 

That’s not to say that all of him had turned dark. When he was alone with Lian and I, he was the same Atara that had grandly proclaimed that I was the only person he would ever kneel for in full view of the public. He hummed lullabies and whispered stories, he attended pretend tea parties, he soothed nightmares, and he kissed skinned knees. He still slept draped over me like a blanket, murmuring the sweetest of nothings against my ear in that hazy world between awake and dreaming. He still loved me. He told me every day when he woke up in the morning and again when he was falling asleep. He mumbled into the top of Lian’s head while our child made the most horrid of faces because Lian hated nothing more than being held against his will. 

He was a thriving, free-spirited, _defiant_ little creature with a riot of bouncing blond curls and my eyes, but when he smiled, he was all Atara’s--impish and giggly. He could not be contained by barriers, gates, or even clothes. He despised wearing shoes and many a pair of them had been lost forever in the royal family’s private gardens--now _Emory’s_ garden--probably buried in soft black dirt by that wretched dog or tangled in the overflowing vines of the clivia flowers. He liked to paint, in particular, and often I’d see him crawl into the bench under our window and look out over the sea or into the market. He’d point at the people and he’d ask questions the way that all children asked questions.

But Lian had never left the walls of the Keep. He had never ventured to Eden or Southwatch. He had never even been in Coryth proper. His world was small and contained because Atara feared what the outside would do to him--that it would craft him into the kind of monster that Emory could be or that it could instill in him the same fear that sometimes had Atara bolting upright at night, soaked in a cold sweat, scrambling for me in the dark to make sure that I was really there because, two years removed, that was still a thing. When the nightmares were the worst, he would cling to me, desperate for an anchor to reality, and I had long since come to terms with the fact that Atara was going to live with that forever.

What I could not come to terms with was trying to tell him that he couldn’t keep Lian in a cage for the rest of his life. He couldn’t box him up inside the Keep and never let him experience the world and Atara always sheepishly agreed, but he never _changed_ and why would he? He thought he was protecting him.

He’d thought he was protecting him when he went flying off the handle at Emory the afternoon that followed his discussion with Tristan and Ridley.

“You have to _do_ something,” he snarled, arms crossed, standing in the informal dining room in Emory’s apartments. Their family portraits were on the walls again and the walls themselves had been repainted to the colors they’d worn before the siege. In fact, everything had been changed back. Emory’s quarters were like walking into a time capsule from a life none of us existed in anymore. Cyril no longer lived there. Fox was dead. Atara and I occupied our own apartments. The Bordelon family as I had come to know it had splintered with the death of their patriarch and though Atara did his best to hold them together, insistent that it was his job if Emory couldn’t do it (and Emory couldn’t, not with the amount of liquor he drank), it never quite worked out the way that it should have. It was never...exactly the same.

Emory leaned back in his chair, the front legs lifting from the floor, his fingers tight against the table. They were the only thing keeping him from toppling backward. “Do what, Atara? I’m not sending that child away. I’m not taking it from Nicolette.”

“Then give her tansy,” the Infinito bit out, his eyes wild and livid. In my lap, Lian squirmed and arched his back, looking up at me from a picture book of insects he was rifling through. He blinked and I stared back down at him, his heart a quick tap-tap-tap through his back to my chest. It was almost like he knew--like he _knew_ that once upon a time, I’d wished for him to go the way that tansy would have taken him. I’d wished him gone, if only to make survival easier for Atara, if only to give me time to _adjust_ to the idea of a child--

That guilt ate me alive every time he looked at me. I knew, realistically, that Lian had no way of knowing or even understanding the implications of what I’d wished and I vehemently wanted to take it back. I’d taken to him like parenthood was the job I’d been specifically crafted for and I’d found that, even without role models of my own or functioning parents of my own, there was a certain instinct to it. I didn’t _need_ anyone to tell me how to handle him. It was just there, as if it had always been there.

“That _child_ will be a threat to any legitimate ones you have,” Atara snapped. “And if you want to piss away the throne and set Coria up for another civil fucking war, be my guest, but that bastard of yours carries _our_ blood. If it’s born male with marks it’s a threat to _my_ son and I will do something about it.”

“Atara,” I warned quietly and Emory let the chair drop down to all four legs again before he got lazily to his feet.

Emory stretched, not unlike a feline, all long limbs and casual indifference. “Are you threatening me, little brother? Because that _sounds_ like you’re threatening me and trust me, that is not a bridge you want to cross right now.”

Atara’s eyes narrowed and I lifted Lian, setting him carefully down into the chair I’d been in so that I could grasp the younger prince by his forearm. “Atara,” I warned again. “Darlin, come on, let it go. None of us know if that child could even _have_ them because _you_ \--” 

He turned to Emory, disregarding me, lip curled in a sneer. “All because you needed a _whore_. Because you are an irresponsible, selfish, _drunk_ who can’t just let go of Nikita and move the fuck on!”

Something snapped. I could almost hear it in the atmosphere around them, like a crackling of that sibling rivalry coming to life, punctuated by the rush of air from Atara’s lungs when Emory collided with him, driving him back into the wall of the dining room. The portraits rattled in their frames and the King’s fingers tightened, curling into Atara’s collar. I felt...torn. On one hand, I wanted desperately to get my hands around Emory’s throat and crush his windpipe. That was the old me. That was Mackenzie from three years ago, Mackenzie before Lian--full of blind devotion to a pretty young lover and enough grief to fuel a lifetime of anguish. 

There was no room in me for my own grief anymore. All of my struggles, both past and present, had ceased to matter with Lian, and the majority of me was content to let Atara slug it out with his brother in a fight he shouldn’t have started so that I could take Lian out of the room.

As if on cue, the toddler, startled by the heave of Emory’s stomach when Atara brought his knee up into it, began to bawl. His wide, large eyes welled up with fresh, glossy tears and a terrified, pitiful wail escaped his throat. He looked from the two of them to me and back again, face flushed and mouth open in a perfect O shape. 

I made my decision and scooped him up, his little arms tight around my neck when the door to the apartments swung open and I felt myself physically deflate with relief when Cyril walked in, blue eyes wide with surprise and then irritation.

“Emory Mereen!” he barked, spouting off into Lierian so quick and fluidly that I could barely keep up. “Atara Ambrose!” The Infinito’s name punctuated the rapid-fire words and he strode across the room, seizing Emory by the collar and jerking him backward so that he could step between the two of them like they were still teenagers. Lian sobbed pathetically, his face buried in my clothes, little legs swinging around my chest while I held him. 

They both stared. Atara, at least, had the sense to look contrite. Emory just looked bored and still annoyed, his fingers curled into fists. “You are grown men,” Cyril scolded sharply, his eyes flicking between the two of them. “ _Grown_ men. Atara, you, at least, should have the sense not to pick a bloody fight with your baby in the room! What kind of irresponsible, immature _bullshit_ is this? Your father would be ashamed of you both.”

“Emory’s got a bastard on the way,” Atara snarled the words. “One he just intends to let have run of the fucking city.”

I bounced the boy I was cradling, shooting him a look at the language that spilled out of his mouth. He’d been on Ridley and Tristan both about it earlier that day, but get Atara riled up and he could cuss worse than the filthiest sailor in the port and fuck who heard it. 

Cyril pursed his lips. “I know he does,” he informed us both curtly. “I knew a month ago. Long before any of you. Before even Tristan. Nicolette and the child will live with me. It will be given an education, it will want for nothing, and it will be married into a family we can already easily control to limit the damage it can do in the future.”

I _almost_ laughed. I would have, if Atara hadn’t looked so positively livid over the fact that Cyril had known this, planned for it, and already covered all of his substantial fears with easy solutions. I’d told him before he’d chased Emory into his apartments that it would be better to wait it out. I’d warned him to put more thought into it before he flew off the handle, but Atara had always been better at thinking with his heart than with his head. I _understood_ that desire to protect the toddler currently weeping into my shoulder, still upset by the tension in the room. I would have done anything for Lian--manipulated ,whored, cheated, butchered--there was no line too heinous to cross, but those were supposed to be last resorts. Other options were supposed to be exhausted first.

“It’s a threat to Lian,” Atara hissed, insistent and still furious. “I will not--”

“You will not touch that girl or that baby,” Emory snarled in response. “Because I swear to the gods, Atara, if you put one finger on them--”

“Boys!” Cyril shouted above them both and stepped between them once more, a hand out on each of their chests. “ _Enough_! Atara, that child will be mostly human. Even marked, it will pose very little threat to Lian, given that your boy can pass as a pureblood and it’s _family_. We don’t threaten family.”

Atara scowled, but he stepped away, shrugging Cyril off on his way to the door. Emory shot me a look, almost a warning to keep him out of his way when I followed the Infinito with Lian, finally settling into distraught silence, balanced on my hip. We walked without words. Atara seethed, fingers curled in fists, cheeks flushed, and he stalked down the halls to our apartments where he shoved the door open with such force that it hit the wall and cracked the plaster. Lian whined, yelping and tightening his arms around me.

“You’re scaring him,” I pointed out, narrowing my eyes at Atara, who made no move to change the way that he was behaving. I took Lian back to his bedroom, sleepy, sniffling, and clingy, and changed him out of his clothes so that I could tuck him into his cot with his doll. He didn’t plead for stories the way that he usually did, just huddled down with his stuffed toys like they were barriers from the world around him, peering at me from the edge of his blanket.

“He’s not mad at you,” I promised, kissing the top of his head and he blinked, silent, his lower lip still out in a pout. “Try to sleep, little dove. I’ll be back to check on you.” I doubted he would stay up much longer. It was an hour past his usual bedtime anyway and he was tearful and weepy when I slipped from the room and made my way back to Atara.

The Infinito was still in the sitting room, arms crossed, feverishly pacing. He scowled at me when I approached him and I stopped just out of reach, my hands in my pockets, waiting for the inevitable breakdown. “Are you okay? You hit that wall pretty hard when he pushed you,” I pointed out, arching an eyebrow in question.

“I’m fine,” Atara snapped back. “You seem oddly at ease with the fact that Emory’s bastard could rebel against our _son_.”

“The son you just made cry? That one?” I asked, rocking on my heels and he frowned. “Because from where I stand, you’re the one that seems oddly at ease with this. You’re so focused on making sure his future is safe that you can’t see the harm you’re doing _right now_. You’re talking about Emory’s child! Your niece or nephew!”

Atara fumed, breathless and radiant. He was beautiful when he was angry, like chaos lived under his skin and everything he touched would be painted with destruction. It almost made me want to forget how horrified I was by all of this--by his behavior and by my own failure to react to it the way that I should have and by Emory’s lapse into violence like it was nothing….I would have rather bent him over the side of the couch and worked his frustration out that way--spanked him and fucked him and put him to bed.

“I understand,” I started gently, reaching for him and he jerked away, turning to look out over the water again, like he could stare off into Immara and see the chains that held his people. “I get it, darlin, I really do. I’d do anything to protect him. I’d cross any line, but those lines are supposed to be last hopes. They’re not supposed to be your knee-jerk reaction. Once, not so long ago, you knew that. This…” I gestured to him and he turned from the window, eyes glassy and bright with raw rage and revulsion. “This--whatever you’ve been lately--this isn’t the man I fell in love with. You left some part of you down there.”

“No,” He corrected bitterly. “I _found_ some part of me down there, Mackenzie, and _you_ of all people--you don’t get to lecture me on what I should think about Emory’s baby when you thought the same about your own.”

I flinched, my teeth set, and pushed forward. He was trying to get under my skin to end the argument. He was _trying_ to crowd me into defeat with reminders that I’d been awful, too. “And that was monstrous,” I reminded him. “And I have to live with it every day. You don’t want that sort of guilt, darlin, trust me.”

“We are _all_ monsters,” Atara hissed, teeth clenched, face red with fury. “Emory turned Nikita into a whipping boy. He murdered and butchered his way through a quarter of the lesser gentry to get through those fucking walls--”

“For you!” I exclaimed, shock flooding my body like adrenaline in my veins. We didn’t talk about the siege. Not really. Atara didn’t like to go back there, but hearing it now...hearing it now it was like some life-changing epiphany of an experience and not the living hell that it actually had been for all of us.

He shook his head. “You wanted Lian dead. Nikita abandoned all of us and me…” He chewed his bottom lip. “I’m the reason it all happened. _My_ decisions, or lack thereof, put all of us in that position. So don’t tell me that it’s _monstrous_ , Mackenzie, because _monstrous_ is fucking normal for us! We are all fucking monsters!”

My stomach twisted and I blanched, cringing back from him and his raw, unbridled rage that radiated off of him, a lethal blossom of unfettered fury. Gods, he was beautiful and dangerous and he reminded me so much of Emory before Lysander’s asylum. He needed to get out of Coryth. It wouldn’t solve the problem of him turning his own head into a prison, but it would take him out of this dark, hideous memory full of his unleashed demons, and it would give him a fresh start. 

“If I have to kill that girl, I will kill that girl,” he whispered and he pushed past me, making his way toward our bedroom. Part of me wanted to follow, to just forget about all of this, because it was easier when he was tired and he slipped back into his old habits, shed the skin of this hardened leader that he’d taken up after the siege, but I felt like I was going to vomit just listening to him talk.

I found my voice before he closed the door and stood, poised on the edge of the corridor. “It will cost you everything,” I told him softly.

“And you think I can’t stomach that?” he looked back at me when he spoke, head cocked to one side. “What do I have left? My brother is a drunk. Cyril is a recluse who only comes here when he has to. My father is dead and you, Mack...you’re afraid of me. So I have Lian and I will do anything and everything to protect him.”

“Look at what you’ve become,” I insisted. “Don’t you remember how you felt when I told you what I thought about Lian while you were in that cage? Don’t you remember that fear? That hate? And you’d inflict that on your only brother--after everything Emory has already suffered--and for what? To prevent something that _might_ happen--probably won’t, but _might_?”

He blinked back at me, the dark green in his eyes that I’d loved so much no longer the forest that I remembered it being but the mottled, black and green color that clung to the damp walls in the dungeons. “If I have to, yes. If he doesn’t solve the problem, yes.”

“He’ll kill you. You know that, right? Sebastian wouldn’t think twice about slitting your throat for him.” Panic welled in my mouth and I remembered those long, horrifying days watching the wall, waiting for his broken body to be thrown over the side.

They might as well have done it. He lived and breathed and craved that darkness that lived in him. I didn’t know who he was anymore, not in moments like this, and I chose to believe that his anger would subside and he’d come down from this adrenaline rush. He’d go back to being Atara tomorrow. He’d think on it and he’d apologize and I’d love him the way that I always had.

Atara shrugged and when he spoke, his voice was kind of detached like he well and truly didn’t particularly care about any of it. “You coming to bed?” he asked, slipping easily into the next subject and I scoffed, stepping backward and away from him toward Lian’s room.

“I don’t even know you are anymore,” I told him quietly. “And I don’t think you do, either, so...no. No, I’m not.”

“Mackenzie--”

I opened our son’s bedroom and let the door click shut behind me. The lock slid into place a moment later and I heard him twist the knob once, but he didn’t fight. He retreated in silence and left me there, turned on my side with Lian curled into my chest. Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I’d try again and the day after that again and every day that followed until I got through to him.

And tomorrow, I added...tomorrow I’d talk to Emory about Lysander. If all else failed, maybe he could save Atara from himself.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Emory

“Hitting him?” Cyril asked when the door shut behind Atara. “Honestly, Emory, are you lapsing back into that?” His eyes were bright and furious and he stared me down as I moved through the dining room, plucking up a bottle of bourbon and a crystal glass. I shouldn’t have. I’d had more than enough liquor through the day, but it was the only thing that numbed emotion anymore and Atara and me twisted as tightly as a spring. 

I should have taken what he said with a grain of salt. He hadn’t really ever gone back to being _himself_. Not completely. When situations were stress-free and it was just us in the garden with Lian, he was my brother again. He chased after his little boy and told him wild stories about dragons and heroes and our ancient ancestors who helped free Corian from under the rule of Immara. He laughed and he wrote in his journals and when Mackenzie joined us, he would launch himself at the new Lord Glenning, land on his back, and wrap his arms tight around Mack’s shoulders. He was _Atara_ again in those moments...and then he wasn’t. Mix anything with fear or anxiety into the concoction, and he became a totally different person.

I knew that. I’d seen it happen myself and I understood that it was just his way of dealing with what had happened to him in the cells under the palace. It was coping, just like violence and liquor had become my way of coping and dissociating was Mackenzie’s and pleading for punishment had been Nikita’s. Atara’s way of coping was to fight, tooth and nail, even when it was hopeless and he clung to spite and vengeance because, in those months in that cage, spite was all he’d had.

I downed one glass and poured another, ignoring Cyril until he put his hand on top of the crystal to stop me from lifting it to my lips. “You know he didn’t mean that,” he pointed out. “You know that he could never do that to you.”

“Do I? Because I’ve seen him order executions and he doesn’t ever seem particularly bothered by it,” I reminded him dryly. “He’s different than he used to be.”

“But he loves you, Emory. He stays here for you. You are the last person in the world that Atara wants to hurt.” And I knew that, realistically, but there had been a fear reaction in me that I hadn’t expected. I’d wanted children for so long and now it was in my grasp, just a few months away, and I _understood_ Atara’s horror over all the things that could harm Lian. I felt them then, spreading through my limbs like disease, and I would protect my child the way that he protected his own. There was an inherent, instinctual drive to lash out over those threats.

He’d only been doing the same because, somehow, his ability to filter it between appropriate and inappropriate responses had been damaged. Mine hadn’t, I’d just always been quick to answer fury with my fists.

“I know,” I eventually relented and he moved his hand so that I could lift the glass to my lips again. “I _know_ he probably wouldn’t and I’m going to make sure he isn’t able to. I’ll have Sebastian post some of his people outside your estate.”

Cyril wrinkled his nose. “That’s unnecessary,” he argued weakly, but then he shrugged. “Just make sure they stay out of sight. They make me feel…” He shuddered, but I understood the reaction. The Inquisitors that worked under Sebastian were unnaturally quiet. They made me feel like I had spiders walking up my spine, too, when they stared too long. Sebastian was the exception to the rule, but I _knew_ him. He took his mask off for me and we played chess sitting in the window of the rookery where he kept his great, predatory birds. There were four of them then. Commandant, Scarlet, Nina, and a freshly hatched baby that Cassie called Macaroon. I sincerely doubted the name would stick, given the nauseated face he made every time she cooed over it. Then again, if she insisted, Sebastian’s will would break before hers did simply because it was _her_ doing the insisting.

After a moment, Cyril leaned in and kissed my cheek. “I’m happy for you, boss,” he told me quietly. “I really am.”

What was left unsaid, however, was the concern that laced his voice when he left the room and I was sitting alone with my bourbon and my thoughts. We were all concerned. We had been since Atara had been plucked back out of the prison below the Keep. My brother was slowly but surely unraveling and a large part of the reason why was his insistence on staying in Coryth with me. 

And I appreciated that gesture. Losing Nikita had been...more than difficult and though I never spoke about him, though I preferred to section off the parts of my memory that were dedicated to my northern lover, he was _always_ on my mind. I found that it was less about the physical of our relationship than it was about...everything else...that I missed the most. It was the sound of his voice that I craved, the flippant laughter that he covered up his insecurities with, and the groggy mornings I’d spent with him. There’d been so few of those...of just waking up with him, feeling the pleasant weight of his body next to mine, and I so often reached for him when it was Nicolette beside me. Dreams let me imagine the perfumed smell of her sheets--jasmine and geranium--was not her at all, but the leather and apple smell of him and then I’d feel her, soft and smooth instead of hard and peppered with a lifetime of physical trauma.

I was too tired to fight anymore and too overjoyed to care about my brother’s emotional turmoil. That made me selfish, exactly as he’d said it did, and when he apologized several days later, I had little to say to him. In fact, I had little to say to Atara for several months after that fight in my quarters. I watched from afar as Mackenzie put gradual distance between them and I felt the heartbreak. 

Atara had been so happy once.

Now, he wasn’t. He was adrift, lost at sea and making no attempt to find his way back to the shore where Mack and Lian would have been waiting for him. He preferred his isolation and his obsession, his eyes trained on Immara and I understood it. I’d listened to Ridley, too. I’d heard the horror stories he told and then I’d heard them again from Sebastian, who had grown up in a stable owned and operated by his father. I’d been a fool to believe that the ugliest parts of the human race had been given life when Elizabeth let Mackenzie be used up, chewed on, and spit out in a brothel. I’d thought it couldn’t get any worse than the wretched traditionalist views of the north that turned Nikita’s sexual orientation into self-loathing.

I’d been wrong.

There was nothing I could do, though. Nothing I could say and there had been times when Mackenzie approached me like he _wanted_ to say something, but the words came out wrong or he didn’t know how to say what he felt, so he always ended up walking away.

Or, at least, he did until that afternoon at Cyril’s little estate in the city. I spent my evenings there more often than I didn’t when Nicolette moved in, growing rounder by the day. I’d never experienced pregnancy among common people. I’d seen it only in the gentry when it was something to be paraded about--less a child than it was a unifier of two houses, a blood link that cemented alliances. None of that meant anything to Nicolette. She didn’t talk endlessly about the importance of the child being a boy and, truth be told, there was a part of me that desperately wanted a girl. A girl, at least, would be less threatening to legitimate heirs and thus, less of a problem to my brother, who had begrudgingly agreed to Cyril’s terms.

It had been a long time since we’d had a girl around the Keep. Olivia had been the last Bordelon female to live there and I thought...it would be nice to name a girl after my cousin who, according to Mackenzie, had kept her head up and her back straight through the entire ordeal. ‘ _Strong_ ,’ he’d told Brentlyn when my uncle’s grief eventually ebbed to tolerable levels right around Meyer’s wedding with Joey Valmont. ‘ _She said she thought you would have been proud of her.’_

Brentlyn had nodded. ‘ _I am,_ ’ he’d agreed quietly, staring down into the glass of wine in front of him before he looked up and watched Meyer and Joey speaking animatedly to my aunt Isabella. ‘ _But I’d rather have a living coward than a dead hero._ ’

Of course, we all knew that it wouldn’t have mattered in the end if Olivia had told Elizabeth what she wanted to hear or not. The moment she’d been clapped in irons, her fate had been sealed...but I thought he would have appreciated the gesture of naming a girl after Liv. I’d half-expected Danica and Riordan to name their daughter after her when their first came screaming to life just ten months after their own wedding, but when Riordan had handed her to me in my visit to Southwatch, he’d called her _Milena_ and I’d said _his_ name for the first time in two years.

“Nikita will love that,” I’d told him, and I’d known wholeheartedly that he would.

Nicolette, however, insisted she was having a boy. “But how do you know?” I asked that afternoon six months into her pregnancy. She was sitting in a rocking chair next to a freshly carved infant’s cot, casually knitting a red and black blanket that I thought would look positively morbid on a newborn, but I understood the sentiment and I appreciated it.

“I just do,” she answered, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth, arms resting over her swollen belly. “Mackenzie agreed, by the way. He says he thinks I’m carrying like it’s a boy.”

“Mackenzie’s only child _is_ a boy,” I insisted. “How would he even know the difference? He’s not a midwife.”

Nicolette huffed, brow knitted in concentration and the needles in her hands sped up. “Have you put any thought into names?” she inquired, hastily changing the subject. “I’ll understand if you haven’t, of course. _I_ can name him without you. You’ll want to save family names for your legitimate children.”

I rolled my eyes. It always came back to that and though Nicolette was not bitter (in fact, I doubted she even had the ability to _be_ bitter) she did know that she was common and I was not and that any child we had would be common unless I legitimized it. That, of course, would piss off the courts, but it wouldn’t have been the first time in my family’s history that a bastard was legitimized. It would be the first _firstborn_ , which was why Atara claimed it would be so dangerous, but anytime he brought that up I just reminded him that according to Corian law, Lian was a bastard, too. Corian law, however, didn’t matter when it came to Lian’s status as heir to the Nation. Mackenzie _was_ the mate to the Infinito. Any children from their union were automatically considered gods.

Of course, Mackenzie, at least, had legitimized Lian as a _Glenning_. There’d been a fair amount of noble uproar over it, but Atara was the second son and not the King. The fanfare and the scandal died quickly.

“I told you,” I repeated what I’d said to her a dozen times before. “I _can_ legitimize him. It would be...politically difficult, but that’s why I have Cassie and Sebastian.”

“Your Immaran pets,” Nicolette deadpanned. “ _That_ will go over well--two Immarans handling the political scandal of your firstborn bastard taking the Bordelon name? Hard pass, Emory, thank you. Although…” She hesitated and her fingers stilled. I leaned forward in my chair, which was really just the ottoman for the rocking chair she was seated on, and watched her intently.

Nicolette was beautiful. In another lifetime, in a world where I’d never met Nikita Novak, where heartbreak hadn’t forged me into what I was, I might have loved her. She was funny and smart in a street savvy sort of way. Her accent, thick and Marsher with rolling Rs and a gleeful, vibrant sound was the sort of speech I could listen to all day without growing bored. She liked to drink and gamble and I’d once seen her tap dance across the surface of a bar while I watched, hood up, from a corner. She was the sort of woman that you adored, but not the sort you introduced to your mother.

Of course, Cyril loved her for exactly that reason. Nicolette didn’t wear a mask like the other gentry did. She was herself, pure and simple, and she refused to hide that for anyone. It reminded me of Nikita--of that brute and forward way he had of behaving because he’d never received formal training on how to handle being around other gentry.

“Although what?” I asked after a moment, watching her intently while her bright eyes, verdant green, stared down at the blanket she was knitting before she looked up at me.

Nicolette sighed. “If something were to happen to me, Emory...you _would_ take care of him, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t just send him away?”

I paused and took her in...really _noticed_ her...she looked tired, but that was to be expected, and her hair was loose around her shoulders in copper colored curls. She complained frequently that her legs were swelling, that her chest hurt, that her heart was too fast, and Cyril had told me a few times that things like that were to be expected, but Tristan had expressed certain...concerns. Nothing, he said, that I should worry about immediately. Probably nothing at all, he’d tacked on.

But it had clearly been enough to worry her. “I would never just send him away,” I promised quietly. “I would give him my name and I would take him up to the Keep and if keeping him safe meant never marrying anyone, then that’s what I would do, Nicolette. I promise.”

She laughed it off, but there was a distinct lack of joy in the sound as she picked the needles up from the surface of her belly again. “Of course,” she agreed after a minute. “I shouldn’t expect anything else from you after all you’ve done for this city since you took it back. I’m surprised they haven’t started temples devoted to _you_.”

I made a noise, disgusted, and reached for her fingers to still them on her stomach and she looked up, surprised by the contact. Touch, in our relationship, had always been strictly during sex and even then, I _usually_ tied her hands down. She knew, of course. I’d spilled the whole sordid story out one night after a nightmare and she’d just _listened_. She’d listened the way that Lysander had when I’d finally told him. There’d been no judgement on her face and when I’d finished, wiping my mouth furiously to fight the urge to vomit, I’d made some joke about how she probably thought it was pathetic that I still had nightmares like a child. She’d cupped my face, wrinkled her nose, and told me that she thought I was _brave_.

So she never sought to touch me except when it was invited--verbally or otherwise, and I disliked touch so much that I rarely sought it out on my own, but it felt pertinent that day. It was important that she understood that I had no intentions of writing her off and sending her away to take care of this child on her own and if something did happen to her, gods forbid it, I would play mother and father if I had to. 

“Are you alright?” I eventually asked and she looked down at the fingers I was holding, at the signet ring that twisted around one of them, and she thumbed over the back of my hand.

She shook her head. “Just Tristan saying my heart is beating too fast all the time,” she laughed. “He says I should be fine and usually I would believe him, but...I just have a bad feeling about it, Em.”

“You’ll be fine,” I assured her and I lifted her hand to kiss the back of it. “Tristan will see to all of it personally. I already spoke to him. He and Ridley are going to come down here in a few weeks and stay with you until you’re ready and if you want Mackenzie there, too, I’m sure he wouldn’t be opposed.”

Nicolette giggled. She’d taken a liking to Mack when she’d met him. It had been at a dinner Cyril insisted on inviting Atara and his family to so that he could meet her. It had soothed some of my brother’s fears, though the distance between him and his consort hadn’t gotten any better. The most important thing to come out of that meeting was Nicolette seeing a commoner among the gentry--a commoner who blended in without much of an issue, who had been raised to gentry status, and who had never let a moment of it go to his head. Mackenzie was still Mackenzie, the same soft-hearted, logic-centered, ruthlessly sarcastic healer that he’d been when I’d met him. He just had more gold in his pockets these days.

“It’ll be fine,” she assured me after a moment, and I was stupid enough to believe her. I was stupid enough to believe myself and I never should have. I should have known something was wrong and that could ever go as smoothly as this had been going.

I should have _known_ that it wasn’t fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter. Also, these chapters might take longer to write because I'm now fully into unexplored territory. Almost none of it has been already written as it was with the second installment. That being said, I'll still try to post at least every other day when I end up taking too long <3


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Nikita

When Riders hunted in raiding parties, it was always in twos. I’d been participating in those since I’d been able to swing a sword--long before the tattoos that roped down my left arm had ever been painted beneath my skin. I knew, as well, that there would be more than one hunting party sent to track me. My father would spare nothing to prove that he was right and I was wrong and there was nothing I could do about it. In the moment--when I’d triumphantly told him that I was leaving--I hadn’t cared. I’d been euphoric and liberated, like some great chain had been lifted from around my body and I was _free_ finally...like I’d been holding my breath for so long and now, after twenty-two years, I could _exhale_.

In those moments, nothing and nobody would have held me back. I had a plan. I was going to go south to Coryth and it would take months because it was the dead of winter and traveling Glacia in the dead of winter was a task even the most foolish thought twice about commiting to, but I had done it before. I would do it again. I would cross Glacia and descend through the mountain pass. I would meet the King’s Highway in the Marshlands and I’d ride hard for Coryth through the rainiest parts of the year, when slush turned the mud to ice and the craggy, rocky hills that dotted highlands around the swamps hung heavy with glistening blades of frozen water. 

I would reach the Hollen Wood and then the Witch Wood and I would make my way through the gate of the city. I would throw myself at Emory’s feet and beg for forgiveness I didn’t deserve, not after I’d made so many promises to never leave him, to always be there, to say _yes_ to any proposal he ever made but he’d never made one. We’d never had the time. 

And maybe he would forgive me. Maybe we could have all those things we’d dreamed about when we dared to dream at all in the dark days of the siege--quiet mornings, days spent in bed together, that garden he so desperately wanted...just a chance to be _us_ without the weight of the world biting down on him. 

I’d tell him that I’d been wrong. I’d made mistakes. I’d learned from them and I was so sorry...I was so fucking sorry for everything I’d done and for all the heartbreak I knew he’d suffered for it. I knew that apologies would never be enough. He might not want to hear it. He might not care. He might have moved on or decided to dedicate himself entirely to his throne. He’d promised me when he left that he could never hate me, but I knew Emory better than that. Emory wore hate on his skin like I wore ink and he wielded it like a weapon. He would have grown to hate me for this...for all the broken promises and the suffering. The memories that got me through the days in Ravndal--that night at the asylum when he’d held me up through the withdrawal and mopped the ink and sweat off of my face while I threw up, that day he’d started talking about futures and I’d told him I would have said _yes_ , that day after I’d executed the halfling in the dungeon when he’d held me in his lap while I slept...they sustained me, but they would have been poison to him.

I wiped my blade off on my thigh and looked down at the first sent of Riders to try their hand at settling the score with me. I hadn’t wanted to kill them. I wanted to be _done_ with killing, with washing blood out of my clothes and off of my hands, with having to remember every face when I closed my eyes at night….

I’d given them the chance to walk away. I’d practically begged them to, but they were both young. Late teens, maybe, freshly trained and full of that familiar fire in their bellies that burned with the urge to prove themselves to their lord by killing their fallen Commander. _Traitor_ , they’d hissed at me before they both came flying at me, weapons raised.

“You should have known better,” I whispered, sliding my sword back into the scabbard on my back. “I trained you better.” And I had, because when I peeled their helmets back, I knew their faces. I knew which families in Ravndal would wait for their return and slowly realize that they were never coming back from the Marshlands. Maybe some other party would find them here, on the edge of a cold, snowmelt creek in the highlands, and take their shields back to their mothers. Maybe they’d even carry the boys on them, if anything was left.

I dragged them from the edge and put their blades in their hands. I could almost hear my father call me foolishly sentimental. They were husks now, empty of who they had been. Bodies meant nothing in the north except another chore when the thaw came--another hole to hack and dig, but I’d always felt like leaving a fallen opponent to rot in the sun was somehow dishonorable, no matter how empty the body was. I couldn’t do much for these two boys. I didn’t have the time to bury them or to scratch their names into rocks, so I left them their in the cold with their weapons and their shields on their chests and I hoped that someone better than me found them.

And then I climbed back on Annika and we continued south. It had taken almost two months for those two to reach me and it had been mostly by mistake. I’d gotten foolishly careless when I’d not seen another Rider all the way through Glacia. I’d covered my tracks so well until the highlands, but the thing about leaving home was that I was leaving terrain that I knew and entering something foreign. 

The Marshlands were beautiful. I’d always thought that of my mother’s home. Even in the dead of winter, the evergreen forests on the hills were a dark, lush green and the swamps that dipped between each one were frozen over, clear as glass when Annika and I walked over them. It was a wild, untamed land, almost as deadly as Glacia and in the summer, these massive swamps would become irrigation systems for the rice paddies that were terraced along the sides of some of the hills. 

But it was not familiar to me and travel became slow when my pack ran out of food. I had to hunt. I had to crack the ice for fish and for water. I had to venture into little settlements to feed my horse and that had been particularly difficult in land worked by the Rosewoods, who would gladly tell any Rider that went through if Eerika’s eldest had passed on his way south. They’d never know the difference and I didn’t want to put them in the middle of it, so I made it harder on myself.

That was how they’d caught me and I knew if they had reached me, others had, as well. So Annika and I moved faster, weaving through stone circles dedicated to the gods and passing statues of old kings carved on the side of the King’s Highway. I came upon a new one at an inn I’d been at with Emory on our way north called the Fox and the Hound. He’d told me stories about it--about his time there with Cyril and his name carved into the back of a bed.

It was _his_ statute that had been raised as patron of the little village, those savage looking marks on his face carved and painted into petrified wood. They’d captured his likeness quite well, I thought--the mop of unruly hair, long limbs, large eyes, and the lopsided smile that always crossed his face when he was getting into trouble--and Emory was _always_ getting into trouble.

I felt my heart twist, panging in my chest while I looked up at it and then down at the flower crowns cast at the feet of it, little handmade toys left on the pedestal it sat on, letters, notes, and a thousand tiny foxes made from folded paper.

He would hate this, I thought, laughing to myself about the absurdity of it. Three years ago, they’d called him the Mad Prince. They’d all but written him off, blamed him for the trauma that the world had inflicted on him, and turned to Atara to be their leader and now...now it was _Emory_ they elevated to a status akin to godhood when his brother held the actual title of living god. 

“Nikita Novak,” someone drawled and I recognized the accent as northern. I heard the ring of steel leaving a scabbard a moment later and I whirled, eyes wide, hand up on the hilt of my own blade as two older Riders bore down on me. They were on their own horses, one a hulking white stallion with wild eyes and the other a warm, russet color, snorting in the cold and stomping in the mud. 

It had been stupid to stop so soon, I thought to myself, just a few days after the other boys, but this place held significance to me. _Foolishly sentimental_ , I reminded myself as I ran backward, scrambling up into the saddle on Annika. I spurred her forward, grasping the bow that hung from her side as she broke into a run. She was smaller than those horses, my girl, but she was quick on her feet and she thundered ahead of them, tearing down the road, spraying mud and slush into the sky stained pink by dusk.

I looked over my shoulder, my heart hammering in my throat with adrenaline and anxiety and the powder I was practically living on. My senses focused until all I heard was the throb of her breathing hard through her muzzle, puffs of vapor clouding the air and all I could feel was the roar of hooves hitting the dirt and the swell of her sides as she labored at full speed. 

And all I saw were those two behind me, racing after me, bows drawn, arrows falling short each time they fired and I fired back but they weaved, nimble and trained by years of raids and hunts for animals and traitors alike. 

I suppose I should have felt fear, but fear only got in the way. That was what I’d been taught from the earliest moments of my schooling as a Rider. Some of them chose to use fear as a demon that could keep you alive in the worst moments, but my father called it a weakness. ‘ _Don’t use fear, Nikki,’_ he’d told me. ‘ _Use anger. Use rage._ ’

So I did. I let fury build in my chest--fury at Vasilev for having beaten me into the shape that I was, fury at the north for telling me who I could and couldn’t love, fury at myself for watching Emory walk away when I should have chased after him...I should have climbed on Annika that very night and thrown myself at his mercy. _I was wrong. I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong._

I broke into farmland, desolate and littered with snow piles and dead wheat fields, dotted with tiny cabins puffing smoke from their chimneys and Annika barreled forward, tearing into a line of craggy hills where a stream met a half frozen river, white water rapids roaring through the center in a thunderous scream that deafened anything too close to it, but I heard them before I got too near the water. I _heard_ them.

“Shoot the fucking horse!”

I pulled to the side and Annika veered with me, left and right in a wobbling path, arrows sailing by us as our attempts to dodge allowed our pursuers to catch up. I recognized the chestnut horse when they got closer and I knew the Rider atop it was called Mikhail. He’d trained me, once upon a time, and more importantly, he was Gunnar’s father. If anyone in Ravndal had a reason to want me dead, it was Mikhail, and I could only imagine how gleefully he would have accepted this hunt like it was a bounty because the reward of putting my head on a spike would have been enough for him. 

And in the end, it was his arrow that pierced Annika’s side. It was a good shot. In that moment when her legs crumpled and she tipped forward, dead before she even hit the ground, I was grateful for that. It had pierced clear through her heart and, in doing so, broke mine. I’d bottle fed Annika from her very first hour and I’d slept in the barn with her, draped her in blankets to keep her warm, and turned her into a proud Rider’s war mount. I loved her. She was family.

She died for me. Because of me…because I’d been too stupid to go with Emory when he’d been able to protect us both from this.

Annika screamed in that final moment, blood frothing up from her nose and her lips, and we tumbled down an embankment by the river. I heard her bones break as we fell, me rolling out from under her in the rocks and the ice, and I felt them dig into my armor, scraping and cutting, but the pain was a dim second to the urge to survive. I scrabbled in the snow, panting hard, searching blindly for the bow that had fallen from my grasp when I fell. I tried desperately not to look at the horse, still as stone beside me with wide, dead eyes, the snow under her turning steadily scarlet.

My fingers grasped the hilt of my blade before I found my bow and I tugged it free as the first Rider--the one on the white horse--came leaping over the side of the embankment without his mount. His blade slashed at me, heavy and well wielded, and it screamed against my own weapon, steel on steel ringing out along the edge of the little village, the sound deadened by the din of the rushing water.

I was aching from the fall and from the heartbreak, but that heartbreak turned to rage when I looked down at the corpse of my beloved companion and I threw myself at the Rider, fury giving me strength as I hacked away at him. My muscles complained, cold and sore with each burst of furious blows and parries, and I drove him back toward the water. One final crack of my family’s blade (oh my father would be furious when he realized I still had it) in a mighty upswing drove the other Rider’s weapon upward and I pulled a small blade from my belt, driving it down into his throat with my other hand.

A spray of arterial blood fanned out over the snow and over my armor and he gagged, a wet, gurgling noise flooding his mouth as I kicked him backward and whirled just as Mikhail jumped down at me. He didn’t bother with a blade and I wasn’t ready for his arrival. He punched me dead in the chest, sending my breath rushing out of my lungs like the water over the rocks in the river and I stumbled in the ice, slick with blood. I wobbled, unsteady, and he brought his knee up and into my face and I went flying backward, slight as I was compared to him, the gurgling sound of the other Rider’s death throes not a foot away from me when I landed on my back, dazed. Pain radiated from my face, a blossom of horrific throbbing behind the bridge of my nose that spread over my eyes like the fingers of an open hand. My vision blurred and went double and I scrambled, grasping at the hilt of my weapon as Mikhail grabbed me, hauling me to the edge of the water.

“No!” I heard myself gutter out the word, kicking and thrashing as he tore my weapon from my hands. I was dazed and concussed, swallowing so much blood from my broken nose that it was nauseating me just seconds after the initial blow. My eyes were swelling already and all I could smell was metal and death and _cold_ as he threw me down on the shore. I landed half in the water and the frigid, half frozen river bit down to the bone like a thousand needles all piercing into the marrow at the same time. I’d survived winters in Glacia, but we all knew better than to get wet. Wet was a death sentence, and so I’d never experienced a cold like this. As quickly as it hurt, it almost immediately turned me numb. My teeth chattered as I struggled, swinging half-blind at Mikhail as he climbed on top of me.

“I have waited a long, long time for this,” he sneered and fear finally encroached my throat, closing around my esophagus as I scratched for his face with one hand and tried to pull blades from the various belts and straps on my armor but he was quickly removing them, throwing them out into the crashing white water as I struggled, crushed into the slushy mud by his weight, water rushing over the back of my head and occasionally gushing up over my face.

I clawed at him, helpless and enraged and _terrified_ as his hands finally closed around my throat and pushed. I remembered Emory in that moment, oddly enough, holding his hands around my neck while my vision went black and _gods_ being at his mercy like that had made me so fucking hard, but this felt _nothing_ like Emory. 

Mikhail pushed me down into the water, aiming to kill me while I was disarmed for maximum dishonor, and the water filled my nose and throat, so cold the pain in my nose and my head came to a screeching halt as I thrashed. I clamored, legs kicking and fingers clawing, and I looked up at him through the frigid surface, a murky vision of himself as bubbles escaped my mouth and I thought, ‘This is where I die. This is where it ends and Emory will never know. He’ll never know how sorry I am, how wrong I was--’

That only encouraged me to fight harder and I writhed, my arms flailing, digging down into the silt and sand beside me until my fingers scrambled against a rock. I scrambled for it, lungs screaming, vision going quickly black, and I got a grip on it just in time to smash it into the side of Mikhail’s face. Blood speckled the water as he tumbled sideways, clutching his jaw, and I heaved myself to the surface, gasping for breath as I thrashed to my feet, numb and shivering. I grabbed the sword from the ice and I ran right toward the water.

I’d take my chances with the rapids over Mikhail. I slipped and stumbled in the shallows, acutely aware of him wobbling to his feet behind me, giving chase through the ice and the water. I could barely see with my eyes swelling from the broken nose and he caught me twice, throwing me down into the shallows while I struggled, slashing wildly and blindly at him with my blade, numb to the core. I was all too aware that if I didn’t get to a heat source quickly, I was going to freeze to death. Mikhail wouldn’t have to kill me. I’d die on my own, my blood thickened and crystallized in my veins from the horrific temperature. My teeth clenched or chattered intermittently and I heaved for air, lungs aching and tingling from the cold. I was slowing down, but so was he and every time he caught me, his clumsy, half-frozen motions would allow me the space I needed to scramble back to my feet--

Until it didn’t. Until he knocked me down and I slipped, blind and _dying_. My foot caught in the rocks and the ice and I twisted on the way down. I heard the bone snap, but I couldn’t feel it in the cold. I couldn’t _feel_ anything. I could barely see anything. Fear and panic choked me as much as the temperature. I was only aware that when I tried to stand again, my leg didn’t support my weight. I pitched forward in the dark, in the snow, in the ice…

And I fell into the water--into the _deep_ water. It swept me under, weapon clutched desperately in my hands, and it stole my breath until my thoughts drifted to black with my vision, held down by the current. I was battered by the water, thrown into boulders and into the cloudy, murky bottom of the river. I drifted under ice and broke free for a gasp of cold air before I was sucked back down, moving in and out of consciousness that would not have been possible without the drugs that kept me from completely slipping away. My struggle turned weak. I lost chunks of time. I fought and screamed and prayed and when I really thought it was over, when the cold finally reached my heart and my lungs were deflating, filling with fluid, and I was replaying all those tender moments I’d shared with Emory--

I felt hands--thick, gloved hands pulling me up out of the half-frozen rapids.

“Not today,” an unfamiliar voice told me sternly. “You don’t die today.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, look, songs. _Mary_ is pretty much my favorite song right now and if you haven't listened to Big Thief, you should go do that right now. All of their music is super raw and beautiful. 
> 
> \--Nikita--  
> Mary, _Big Thief_  
>  This Night, _Black Lab_  
>  Pretty Things, _Big Thief_  
>  Welcome Home, _Radical Face_  
>  Haunted, _Radical Face_


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Nikita

When I woke, it was slowly. It seemed I was only capable of regaining my senses one at a time and so first I became aware of what I _felt_ \--heat from a crackling fire, the scratching wool of a homespun blanket on a small, creaking bed, _pain_...pain that radiated outward from behind the bridge of my nose and over my eyes and pain that throbbed down my broken leg with every beat of my heart and pain that arched and panged all over my body from a thousand different bruises and cuts.

Then I became aware of the medicinal taste in my mouth--clove and liquor and the bitter bite of poppy milk. Nearby, a fire popped with fresh logs and someone moved around the room, a slow, steady shuffling of feet, rearranging the source of the heat and _cooking_ , I thought. I could smell something warm and spiced bubbling on that fire, tinged with the scent of burning oak wood, antiseptic salves, and clove and tobacco mingling together.

My mouth was cracked and dry, I noted, and I heard whoever was moving through the room come to rest at my side. A moment later, clean, cold water was pressed to my lips until I swallowed, grateful but coughing, and finally opened my eyes. 

At first, my vision was blurry, as if I were still staring up through the water Mikhail had held me down under, but it cleared as I came to, the doubles I was seeing in finally settling into singles while I looked around. 

Someone had splinted my broken leg, so I knew that my savior, who was busily hunched over a spool of clean, linen bandages, was not Mikhail. Mikhail would have plucked me out of the water, slit my throat, and dragged my decaying corpse back to Ravndal. This person, whoever this was, had _cared_ for me in their little home.

I looked up at the ceiling--at row after row of dried herbs and vegetables, jerky, and drying, bloodstained clothing. _My_ clothing, I noted, as I’d been stripped and redressed in an oversized shirt with and torn trousers, the leg of which had been removed to accommodate the splint. A single window looked out into a snow covered forest, fogged around the edges of the glass. The furniture was all homemade, roughly carved from hardwood, and the bed that I’d been set to rest on was stretched canvas over a frame and a mattress made of a cloth sack stuffed with down and straw. 

I blinked, groggy and trying to find my voice, my fingers grasping at the blanket that was tucked carefully and gently over my torso. 

“Easy,” a voice encouraged me when I struggled to push myself upright. I’d been going somewhere, I thought. I’d had a goal and then...then Mikhail had found me, but I’d fought. I’d fought so hard because I was so desperate to reach...to reach…

 _Coryth_ , I thought to myself. _Emory Bordelon._

I disregarded my leg, pushing and whining in an attempt to get to my feet. I couldn’t stay here. I had to reach him. I had to apologize. I had to make him see how wrong I was. I was frantic in my desire to get up, panic seeping into my throat and burning in my lungs. My stomach twisted with anxiety and I wobbled, muscles weak from exhaustion and recent hypothermia. They cramped and screamed in protest and I felt my good leg buckle the moment I put weight on it so that I fell backward into the bed again, wincing and groaning.

“I said _easy_ ,” my benefactor insisted again and I finally looked up into a pair of warm, Corian blue eyes set in a kindly, round face. His lips moved, chapped and surrounded by dark, scraping stubble. “It’s only been two days. You’re in no state to be up and moving. You won’t be for awhile.”

Two days, I thought to myself. Was I truly two days removed from my tumble into the Glace River, bruised and battered by flowing ice and rock? I tried to remember it and I could, in pieces--I could recall flashes of light when I broke the surface, clawing and scrambling for air before I was sucked back under and thrown into another set of brutal rapids. I remembered thinking that I’d die there and, for the first time in my life, not being ready for it. Part of being a Rider was always being prepared to die. It was a constant possibility--falling in a raid, in a hunt, in a battle….

But I hadn’t been ready then. I wanted so much _more_ and in that moment, I remembered Emory cradling Fox, crying that he’d never had enough time and I knew what he meant then. _We_ hadn’t had enough time and I had never realized it until that moment when my vision was going black and the world was dimming around me, the rapids quickly going silent, my hands and arms floating above me, unable to propel me to the surface of my frigid tomb....that was when I knew that Emory’s kisses had tasted of bourbon and the rest of my life. _That_ was what I felt with him, what I saw when I looked at him, what I heard in his voice when he whispered in my ear at night….

I hadn’t been ready to give that up and that was when, against all odds, _someone_ had plucked me up from the water. I remembered seeing double, trying to move stiffly through clothes that were frozen, my eyes ringed in icicles that clung to my eyelashes. I hadn’t been conscious long after that--only long enough to see a figure dressed in thick furs, a shadowed face in a hood picking me up like an infant, cradled in his arms while cold finally slowed my breathing and my heartbeat to rates that could no longer keep me awake.

And then I was here. Now. Staring up at blue eyes and dark, inky hair. He was older than me, I noted. In his mid to late thirties, if I had to guess, but his home was devoid of any evidence of a family. He’d been looking after me alone.

“I’m Tanner,” he greeted me quietly. “I gathered that your name is Nik from your mumbling in your sleep. Short for Nikolas?”

I almost told him no. I almost _told_ him that I was not Nikolas. Surely, he’d seen the sleeve of tattoos down my arm. He had to know that I wasn’t Corian, not really--that I was one of those dangerous, savage northman that the Corians told horror stories about, but he was common. He might have recognized the colors and symbols on house sigils, but he wouldn’t have been able to name most of the gentry. This far from a city, he probably couldn’t even read. 

And it would be dangerous for both of us if he knew. It was dangerous for me to be here in the first place. I didn’t need to make it any worse by telling him that any Rider who passed through here would probably pay him for my head, that he could sell me to my father for a pretty lump of gold or a handful of precious stones. 

“Nik is fine,” I finally managed to choke through a hoarse, grating voice that had been run ragged by my coughing and struggling for air in the river. “How...how did I….”

Tanner chuckled and got slowly to his feet. He was a big man like my father was--well over six feet tall with broad, heavy shoulders and thick, muscled arms. A collection of hunting bows was gathered in one corner of his little one room cabin, all of them well-oiled and carefully maintained. Years and years of archery would build muscles on the scrawniest of arms. I knew that from experience. I’d started out gangly and thin and training had put weight on my bones, muscle on my body, and hate in my heart.

He spooned some kind of broth from a bubbling pot on the cauldron into a wooden mug and handed it to me before he sat back down in the chair beside my bed. I took the offered heat gratefully, lifting it to my lips. It was poultry stock of some kind, boiled with vegetables and dried herbs, though he’d put nothing but broth in my cup. I imagined with all the powder I’d been taking, I’d probably been vomiting almost constantly since he’d pulled me from the water. I was almost surprised he hadn’t given me a bucket, too.

“I found you caught in the ice while I was out hunting,” Tanner explained. “I thought you were dead at first, but you started thrashing like a fish out of water when I pulled you out. What were you _doing_ out there, anyway? Don’t you know how dangerous this section of the river is in winter? All that snowmelt comes rushing down from the mountains in Glacia and bloats the damn thing like a corpse.”

“I fell,” I supplied dryly.

Tanner clicked his tongue. “You’re pretty busted up, Nik. Broken leg, broken nose, more cuts, bruises, and _scars_ than I’ve ever seen in my life. And that’s a Commander’s sleeve, isn’t it? You’re from Glacia. I can tell now that you’re up and talking.”

I nodded, silent, and swallowed another mouthful of piping hot broth, grateful for the sting of it as it traveled down my throat. Everything felt cold, despite the fire and the blankets and the steaming mug in my hands. Everything still felt _so_ cold. “I’m going south,” I eventually supplied. “I promised someone a long time ago…” I shrugged. “I left someone behind there, after the siege.”

“You fought in the siege?” he asked quickly, eyes widening when I confirmed it with another short nod. “And you’re leaving Glacia? Isn’t that...criminal?”

I put the cup down and ran my fingers through my hair. “Mm. I can’t stay here, Tanner. As long as I’m here, it’s not safe for you.”

“Well, you can’t travel,” Tanner pointed out flatly, his eyes on my splinted leg. “Broken bones can kill you if they’re not healed up proper. The healer in the village says it can make your blood clot right in your veins and stop your heart.”

My initial thought in that moment, peculiar as it seemed, was that Tristan Brighton and Mackenzie Glenning would have loved this man with his rough, calloused fingers and his bright, cheerful eyes, happily telling me that I had to stay in bed because of _blood clots_. I wrinkled my nose and I knew--I _knew_ without even speaking to either of my medically inclined friends that they would most certainly agree with Tanner. 

Friends, I thought. If they were even my friends anymore. Tristan, probably yes, but Mackenzie? Atara would be livid with me for what I’d done to Emory and when Atara felt something, Mackenzie felt it, too. They were like two sides of the same coin.

Tanner continued. “Besides, you can’t hunt on that leg. You’d starve before you reached the next town, if dehydration didn’t get you first. You can stay here until the bone heals up.”

“It’s dangerous for me to stay here,” I pointed out, insistent. Nobody else was going to suffer because of me. Too many people already had. Too many people already _were_. Currently. Emory, for one--Emory who felt heartbreak so profoundly that it tipped the scales of his mental health. Gods, I deserved so much punishment and hatred from him and if he was anything like he’d been when I walked away from him, he wouldn’t even give it to me. He’d be… _sad_ more than anything else. “They have orders to kill me.”

“They’ll have to go through me,” Tanner said matter-of-factly, plucking up the cup I’d put down so that he could wash it in a basin by the door. It was promptly returned to a hook above the fireplace while I stared, dumbstruck at this total stranger’s insistent kindness. People were not kind to me. They feared what I was and where I came from and what I could do. My own _father_ considered me some kind of abomination on his family tree.

And yet Tanner was there, casually stating that he’d stand in the way between brutal, trained killing machines...and me. Me, who he didn’t know at all and had no reason to care about….

“Why?” I asked, numb and struck stupid, my eyes wide while he turned to look at me.

“Why wouldn’t I?” he inquired, answering my question with a question so that my nose wrinkled and I pursed my lips at him. “It’s the right thing to do, Nik.”

I was awestruck, in part because of this random kindness from this stranger who had saved me from drowning or freezing or both. “You don’t even know why they’re hunting me. I could be...insane. I could be an insane--”

“Axe murderer?” he supplied, arching an eyebrow. “I doubt it.” He shrugged his shoulders when I stared, silently questioning _his_ sanity. “You’re a Rider Commander. Even with a broken leg, you could have killed me already and you haven’t so you’re not going to. Why _are_ they chasing you, anyway?”

For a second...for the very briefest of seconds...I considered lying to him. I could tell him that I’d grown sick of the cold and the war and the constant threat of dying so I’d abandoned my post. I could tell him that I’d fallen in love with some common girl in Coryth and that I was giving up my position in the north to marry the farmer’s daughter and learn to grow sugarcane or tobacco. I could have made up any lie I wanted, but I’d been lying for so long. I’d been living in a web of it, sticky with deceit, and leaving had _liberated_ me. 

There was no reason to hide. 

“Because I’m gay,” I answered, almost triumphant when the words left my mouth. They tumbled, easy as breathing, and I laughed a little bit, which made a smile split over Tanner’s face as he watched me. “I wouldn’t marry the girl, have babies, follow the tradition. There’s someone in the south that I left and I never should have. I want to earn him back.”

There was a freedom in being able to say the words, feeling them not just in my mouth the way that I had for years like they were fighting against the prison of my teeth to be _heard_ by the people that mattered and, more importantly, _accepted_. I hadn’t realized it, but there’d been a nagging, chewing anxiety in me in those few moments when I voiced them outloud and that part of me had expected Tanner to lash out like my father had. I’d braced myself for a blow to the face and, without even realizing I was doing it, mapped out the topography of the room that I was in--cast iron cooking pan, firewood, chairs...all things that could be used as weapons while I hobbled for the door to get away from the inevitable fallout.

Tanner didn’t lash out though. He combed his fingers through thick black hair and crossed the room to hang a metal tea kettle above the fire, packed full of snow--I could tell only because the sides of it were frosted with condensation, a sure sign that whatever was in it was bitterly cold compared to the heat of the room we were sitting in.

“So you’re a member of the outcast club,” he eventually spoke and my brow knitted in confusion, but he chuckled and sat down at the small, round table in the center of the room. “Family rejects, blacksheep, bastards, sons and daughters of whores, girls that want to be knights, boys that want to stay home and raise babies...you know, anyone that’s not doing what tradition expects of them or who, by misfortune of birth, never had a place in society to begin with.”

I wrinkled my nose, unsure if I was offended by the vast blanket statement or offended by the implication that he knew what I wanted. “I _don’t_ want to stay home and raise babies,” I insisted, adamantly crossing my arms and Tanner laughed again.

“I never said you did, but surely you fit into ‘family reject’ or ‘blacksheep.’ I don’t know much about Glacia, though. Never been there. Never had much interest.” He shrugged while he spoke, legs extended. He reminded me of a bull--one of those big, aggressive, horned cattle with muscles so thick that you could see them ripple when they moved. That’s what Tanner was built like--like he’d been crafted specifically for hard labor. Just one of his thighs was bigger than both of mine, I thought, and though I had never been large, I was no scrawny, underfed calf either. 

Eventually, I decided it wasn’t worth being offended over. He wasn’t wrong, anyway. “There’s not much to see there, anyway. A lot of ruins from when Immara invaded and a bunch of ass backward fucking morons.”

“Well, I get the feeling they wouldn’t like me anyway,” Tanner snorted. “Village doesn’t much like me either. Kara at the Fox and the Hound buys game from me, but she’s about the only tolerable son of a bitch in the whole lot of ‘em.”

“Why? Did you refuse to marry the girl, too? Must be something in the water.” I looked pointedly down at my broken leg, expertly wrapped in a splint, bound tightly in a pine planks. 

Tanner hummed, watching me inspect his work, still leisurely stretched out in his chair. “Oh, no, there was never any girl,” he assured me with a small laugh. “I was a foundling.”

“A _what_?” I’d spent years in the south. I’d learned a lot of their slang and their names for things and my Corian was exponentially better than it had been when I’d first met Emory. This, however, was a term that I was unfamiliar with.

He cleared his throat. “An abandoned child. Someone sat me by the well in the center of the village and left me there. I was found in the morning by a very young girl fetching water for her family. They took care of me, but they wanted to put me on a caravan south to an orphanage in Coryth and the girl…” He shrugged. “She was having none of it. So she left with me and she raised me here, in this little house, in these woods. I called her mother. She treated me like a son and even though everyone knew I couldn’t possibly be hers, rumors spread anyway. People are cruel, you know, and eventually the rumors became what people took for truth. So I’m a bastard, a foundling, and the son of a whore according to the people in the village. Doesn’t stop them from buying my animals or running to me when their brat kicks a hornet’s nest and they can’t get the swelling down.”

“We don’t have abandoned children in the north,” I answered eventually, my tone flat. I had no children. I never would. I had long since come to terms with that and, to be quite frank, it had never really bothered me for _me_. It had bothered me for Emory, because his rank dictated that he needed an heir and because he so badly wanted to be a father...but something in me feared the idea that I’d be the same monster that Vasilev had been and the thought of inflicting that horror on my own child was nauseating. 

However, even with the knowledge that I had never really wanted offspring, I couldn’t imagine abandoning one out in the open, exposed to the elements and to wildlife and to the very worst creatures of them all--to _humans_. Humans, like the ones that had brutalized Emory and locked Atara in a dark pit for months and beaten me for being too _cute_.

I clarified a moment later. “They would freeze to death,” I explained. “Very quickly. Even if they were left out, there would be nothing found but a hardened corpse and may the gods have mercy on whatever miserable wretch left them there because they’d be hunted down and gutted for it.”

Tanner hummed again and the kettle whistled. He busied himself pouring water into mugs through little pouches of a tea I didn’t recognize. He topped each cup with a quick spot of bourbon and honey, then handed me one and settled back into his chair. “It’ll help with the pain,” he offered. “And the cold.”

“I can take the pain,” I bit out. “ _And_ the cold.”

“Oh, I have no doubt. You know you look like someone put you through a meat grinder, right? You’ve got more scars than smooth skin.”

“ _Thanks_ ,” I drawled, rolling my eyes and bringing the tea to my lips. I should have known what the bourbon would do, but I hadn’t thought about it until I tasted it and I could almost hear Emory laugh against my cheek like we were nestled in the dark again somewhere. I could _almost_ smell it in his breath, hot and sweet when he pressed his mouth to mine. 

I nearly dropped the mug, but my fingers stiffened and tightened on the handle and I swallowed again, grateful for the memory and all the warmth it brought to my stomach and my heart. Tanner was quiet, watchful, like he expected me to pass out, but I kept myself seated upright while I drank it and the liquor sank slowly into my bones. It wasn’t enough to even dull the edge of the pain, but it made me groggy and _sleep_ would take that ache away for awhile, at least.

“You did all this yourself?” I eventually inquired numbly, gesturing to splint on my leg and a bandage on my left forearm. When I brought my hand to my face, I could tell that my nose had been cracked back into place, too, and I could only imagine the fight I’d put up when he’d done it. I couldn’t remember it, though, a probable result of poppy milk and delirious hypothermia. 

Tanner grinned widely. “My mother taught me,” he said, and he seemed...thrilled to have a reason to talk about her. His eyes lit up and the smile didn’t fade from them. “She was a bleeding heart. Always taking in injured animals, orphaned baby birds, orphaned _children_.” He gestured to himself. “She taught me to hunt. Said I should never take the shot unless I know it’ll be clean. Anyway, I had enough practice splinting dogs and cats and birds and I’ve skinned, gutted, and butchered every animal in these woods. Setting bones is easy if you know how bones work and I _know_ how bones work, Nik. It was a clean break, anyway, Easy to pop back together. _You_ were less thrilled about it.”

I snorted. “Oh, I bet,” I agreed. “That what that poppy milk was for?”

He looked at me sheepishly, like he felt guilty about having slipped it to me and would have rather I not noticed at all. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t realize,” he admitted after a second, his fingers clenching and unclenching around his mug. “I needed to clean up your face and see how bad your nose was and I got you pinned down. You were in no state to fight, but then you kept trying to _bite_ me and you were calling for someone.”

I arched an eyebrow and Tanner chuckled. 

“I didn’t catch the name,” he supplied. “Your face was too swollen. Still is swollen, really, and you should try to get some sleep. Real sleep. Without the poppy.”

“Where are _you_ sleeping?” I inquired, eyeing him as he got to his feet. He seemed even more enormous in such a small space, but he jerked his thumb to the far end of the cabin where a ladder led up to a loft. “Oh.”

He took my empty mug from me and I flopped back onto the bed, pulling my strapped leg with me. “Shout if you need anything,” Tanner insisted. “ _Don’t_ get up on that leg. It’s strapped in good, but it won’t hold if you insist on hobbling around.”

“Yes, Mother,” I answered flatly.

I heard him laugh when he climbed the ladder, but he didn’t say anything else. He didn’t really have to. I decided then that I would stay until I could stand again, if only because Tanner felt safe and I hadn’t felt safe since I’d watched Emory walk away.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Atara

Tucked into my side, Lian stared out the fogged window over the city beneath us. Candles burned in windows, creating pale, buttery coronas of light that spilled like water into the streets and lit the small figures of people milling about on their way homes so that we could see them, just silhouettes moving about their daily lives. Lian liked to watch through the windows, eyes wide and rapt with attention, and I _knew_ he yearned to be out there, even at his young age--out where all the action was, where people didn’t serve him, bow to him, or treat him any differently provided they didn’t know his name. He longed for normalcy and I longed for safety.

I liked the sensation of him snuggled under my arm, warm and cared for and in no immediate danger. His hair was damp from a recent bath and he smelled of lavender and chamomile tea, which he sipped from a lidded cup while I lazily ran my fingers through his wet, blond curls. I hummed under my breath and he watched, his face reflected in the glass, and as the minutes marched on his eyes began to slide steadily shut. He leaned into my side heavily. The cup slipped from his small, pale fingers still stained with paint despite the bath. It landed in the windowsill and I lifted it gently, turning it rightside up, and then sat with him for a few minutes. 

I listened to his breathing, slow and steady, and the rhythmic beat of his heart against my hand that left his hair to slide smoothly up and down his spine. When he was well and truly completely asleep, I lifted him gently and though he stirred for a brief moment, he didn’t truly wake up and I was able to tuck him safely into his bed, blankets pulled up to his chin. I kissed his cheeks, marveled at the fact that he was even alive and the he was _mine_. He was beautiful and untouched by the ugly things that had happened to me when I’d carried him and that, in and of itself, was miraculous to me. 

I’d never, in all of my life, imagined loving someone as fervently and as fiercely as I loved Lian and that ferocity twisted into something unhealthy. I _knew_ that. I knew that keeping him boxed inside the Keep would never really teach him about the world outside, no matter how much we watched it from the window and no matter how many stories I told to him. I would tell myself that someday, I’d need to take him beyond those walls to meet his people-- _all_ of his people the way that my parents had taken us outside of the wall to greet the masses on special occasions. My brother, in fact, still made a habit of sneaking out despite what had happened to him. I told myself that I had to be reasonable. I could not turn this place into a cage the way that Elizabeth had turned it into a cage for me.

But then I remembered my brother pinned down in the sand, slick with blood from his knees to his hips, fighting to even get air in through fractured ribs and the weight of someone on top of him. I thought about Mackenzie with his big, gray eyes, as reflective as mirrors, face down on a bed before he’d been old enough to shave, trying to imagine a place that was _anywhere_ but there. I thought about Sebastian, plucked off the street in Paikea and turned into a weapon.

I would not--I _could_ not--let those things happen to my child. Lian, I told myself, would be safe. He would _always_ be safe.

So I kissed his cheeks twice that night and I blew out the candles in his room. I backed away slowly, careful not to run into his rocking horse or the canvas covered in finger paintings or the tower of blocks (L-I-A-N spelled out in the middle, _finally_ ) and I left the door open just an inch when I finally re-entered the corridor.

Mackenzie was there, leaning against the wall, and I stopped short. We hadn’t really...talked much since the conversation about Emory’s new addition. He maintained that I was wrong on all counts--that he understood my fears, but that I couldn’t let fear command my life or twist the person that I was into someone that I was not. He was right, of course. I _was_ allowing fear to turn me into some ugly misrepresentation of myself. I hated what I’d said to my brother--what I’d _thought_ about that child.

Emory had wanted this for so long and I trusted him. If he said that this baby wouldn’t cause any negative ripple in my life, I should have believed him. I should have taken what he said at face value because my brother _loved_ my son. He would never let anything happen to Lian. He would strive to protect them both. I should have _known_ that and I’d tried apologizing, but Emory had remained...distant.

And how could I even blame him? When Mackenzie had said to me that he’d wished Lian away to make it easier for me to survive, I’d been livid. I could only imagine Emory felt the same way in regards to what I’d said and I’d made up my mind about that child afterward. He or she would be family and I would love them as fiercely as Emory loved Lian. I would protect them the same way.

Unfortunately, that did not take back what I’d said.

“He’s asleep?” Mackenzie asked quietly and I nodded, brushing by him to return to the living area where I’d left my maps. My obsession with Immara hadn’t waned. _That_ was his biggest complaint now. We didn’t fight, not really, but Mack felt that I’d become someone he didn’t know anymore and I couldn’t blame him for that. In a lot of ways, I had. Things were different now...drastically, horribly different and I still woke from nightmares, thrashing in my sheets, convinced that I was still locked up in a cage. He used to soothe those nightmares. He used to roll over and I’d feel smothered by his weight, but _safe_ because of it.

I didn’t anymore. Mostly because he didn’t sleep with me anymore...and I hated that. I _missed_ him. I missed him more than I’d ever missed anything in my life and he was _right_ there, but when I tried to broach the subject, he’d remind me that my apology meant nothing if nothing had changed...and nothing had. I still wanted to strike the chains off of my people in the east. I had made the decision to love my brother’s bastard, but I still feared it. I knew that I couldn’t keep Lian boxed in forever, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to try.

I gathered up my maps and I was intent on returning to the task at hand. Mackenzie would retreat to Lian’s room and I’d see them both again in the morning, bleary eyed and exhausted from the terrors that plagued me in the dark.

Except he didn’t just disappear. He didn’t walk away. He sat down directly across from me in the chairs arranged around my workspace and I felt my hackles raise like we were on the verge of this argument again--this circular, cyclic _fighting_. I missed the before. I missed when I’d lived for his attention and he’d provided it so willingly. I missed listening to him talk, being able to talk _to_ him….

“You can’t keep him in here forever,” Mackenzie said quietly. “You know that.” Of course, I knew that. He wouldn’t be mine to keep forever, just like I was no longer Cyril’s to keep or look after. Fox was different. I liked to think he lingered and I recalled that moment in the dungeons when Sebastian had broken Caius’s summoning glass and I’d seen my father rise up from realm of the dead to protect me one last time. I wanted to believe he was still around, pressed against the veil, watching us at a distance in the world where he waited for my Lheiro to join him. I still wasn’t his, though. 

I looked down pointedly at the maps and swallowed hard--a thickening lump in my throat made it difficult to speak and the words scraped along my esophagus and my throat. “I know,” I eventually managed hoarsely. “But I’ll keep him safe for as long as I can.”

“Atara, you will smother him. He’ll hate you for it,” he pressed gently. “This crusade you have--protecting him from the world, from Emory’s bastard, from all the things out there that scared you...what happened to you? You used to see _beautiful_ things. You used to talk about the city like it was poetry. You used to _love_ things.”

He sounded so desperate and I could tell, by the tone in his voice, tha the missed me, too. He had to. Throughout this entire months long stalemate we’d been involved in, he had always maintained that he loved me. He would _always_ love me. He intended to stay at my side until I forced him to leave, but he couldn’t stand to see me burn my life down around my ears the way that I was doing. He couldn’t sit by and watch while I put Lian in a prison gilded with gold. So he was there, but the distance between us was unlike anything that had ever existed before and it went on so long that it became hard to remember the days before the siege when I’d woken up curled against his side, almost carefree--happy, healthy, wildly and desperately in love with him.

“There’s nothing beautiful about that fucking city,” I spat bitterly. “It chews up everyone in it and spits their bones out half-digested. Look at what it does to people! At what happened to my brother and to you!”

“It _created_ me, Atara,” he insisted, eyes wide and startled by the sudden ferocity in my voice. He didn’t often pick this fight anymore. He didn’t often pick _any_ fights anymore. It was like he’d just conceded and accepted that whatever we’d had was...a loss. A fatality. A casualty of his mother’s cruel indifference to the fact that we were people and she’d ruined us.

It felt almost good to hear him argue again, to see that fight back in his face and in the clenching of his fists, white-knuckled and insistent. “I wouldn’t be who I am today if my life hadn’t played out the way that it did,” he pressed. “I would have never met you. I would have never loved you. Lian would have never existed. All those dangerous, horrible things that you’re afraid of...that’s not what out there is actually _like_. You can’t keep...sticking your head in the sand and focusing on Immara when you have problems at _home_.”

“They’re my people,” I answered flatly, looking up to see him shaking his head.

“No, they’re not,” he responded, adamant and irritated. “Caius talked to you about all of this. They belonged to other tribes. They had their own Infinitos. They are _not_ your people. _Your_ people will be the ones dying if you go on some crusade to free Immara.”

“So I sit here and do nothing while they’re in chains? It’s a choice between two evils, Mackenzie!” I shot back. Irritation rose over my hackles, snaking along my spine, hot and furious so that I could feel it in my lungs and in my bones like a malignant disease.

He sat back in his chair, arms crossed, eyes hard and staring at me. “If I have to choose between two evils, I’d rather not choose at all,” he maintained and it struck me, in that moment, that he was right. It took a minute. I stared at him, long and hard, eyes glowering with a rage that only he could stoke in me anymore--only Mack because I cared about his opinion and I loved him and I missed him and being so distant _hurt_ in ways I hadn’t known that I could hurt. I understood why Emory had taken to drinking in Nikita’s absence. Anything to numb this constant, throbbing ache in my chest… _anything_ would have been acceptable.

Instead, I got this--I got Mack telling me how wrong I was and when I didn’t immediately respond, he opened his mouth and continued. “You won’t be the person out there bleeding for your crusade, Atara. Your life won’t be at risk. _My_ people will bleed for that-- _common_ people. People who just want to live their fucking lives in peace and you want to take that away for _Immarans_. And I get it, darlin, I do. What happens over there is sickening, but you can’t save the world. Not all at once. Not right now when Coryth is still scarred and your people are still scared. Give it _time_. Let them heal. _Talk_ to them so that they understand what’s happening over there. Let them feel that rage so when the time is right, they fight _willingly_ for you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. There was nothing really there, nothing to force the words from my mouth and no words to say anyway. He was right. He was always right. I’d been running full tilt at a problem that I couldn’t solve, burying my head in it to avoid the fact that I was wasting away in the Keep...that every set of walls felt like a prison to me and I was letting myself turn my childhood home into a prison for my son, too. 

So I rubbed my eyes and I let go of the maps I’d been holding, leaning back in my chair. I was too tired for this...for any of it. I was tired of fighting, too...tired of skirting around him, pretending everything was fine, letting him play primary caregiver to Lian while I obsessed over a foreign land and a moral issue that I never would have obsessed over before. _Before_ , I’d simply filed it away as part of their culture the way that I had with Glacia’s beliefs on child-raising. It was not my place to judge, I’d said back then. 

The words that came out of my mouth were not agreement or disapproval. They were simple and raw and they were _real_ , which seemed like the most important part of all of it in those days. “I miss you,” I managed to coax out and Mack pressed his fingers to his temples and then rubbed his hands down over his face.

“Yeah, I know, but this…” He gestured to the table, to the room, to the hall where Lian slept inside one of the bedrooms, elaborately decorated with fairy tale murals he had carefully painted himself in the days following Lian’s arrival. “This is just a tactic. This is just you avoiding the real issue and the real issue, killer, is that you shouldn’t be here. We should have left the Keep ages ago. This place is _killing_ you. I miss who we used to be.”

And I understood. I understood more than I could ever adequately describe to him. I remembered that week he’d avoided me when Nikita and Emory had gone toe-to-toe in front of my parents. I remembered the months under the Keep when I’d thought he was dead and I rubbed my face again, trying to will away exhausted tears that always fell at night because I so badly wanted to just _sleep_ and I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t close my eyes without feeling like the walls were creeping in on me. Our bed didn’t smell like _us_ anymore. Ginger didn’t linger in the sheets. For awhile, that had been enough.

It wasn’t enough anymore.

“I can’t...leave,” I choked. “With Nikita gone, if he...if he slips again, there’s nobody here to fill his role except me. Cassie is good, but they’ll never accept her ruling _for_ him.”

Mack sighed heavily, eyes down at the table again, and he fussed and fidgeted with his hands in his lap. “That’s not your problem anymore,” he offered quietly. “I’m worried about you, tiny. You look exhausted. This place...this place is killing you.”

He was right. I knew that he was right and in that moment, nothing really mattered more than being close to him. It had been so fucking long since he’d let me in, since he’d sat and talked to me without stirring the pot of emotions and turmoil that stewed between us into a roaring argument. He had every right to. I’d fucked up. I’d said things I regretted and I’d done things that I regretted and I’d been _terrible_ to people who loved me.

I wobbled to my feet and crossed the small space between us so that I could sink into the couch at his side and instead of getting up and walking away like he might have in the previous weeks, he opened his arm and I sank into the ginger and sugar smell of his body. I pressed my face to his chest, familiar with the sound of his heart and the feel of the ladder of ribs beneath my cheek. _Comfort_ , I thought. _Home_. He was _home_ , regardless of the building around me, and I’d alienated him so effectively that I’d lost track of it. Our partnership had always been equal. I’d never treated him like his opinion didn’t matter until I didn’t like the one he gave me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered the words into his clothes. “For all of it. For everything. I should have listened to you from the beginning.” A weight lifted from my shoulders with those words and, unencumbered, I lifted my mouth to ghost kisses over his jaw and he ran his fingers over my head and through my hair. 

Mack shifted, dragging me with him so that I was draped over him on the couch, reclined and sleepy and _warm_ against him. “It’ll take more than apologies,” he answered quietly. “But for now, it’ll do. You need to sleep, Atara. Without nightmares.”

“I hate the dark,” I admitted eventually. “It was...easier. Before.” Before he’d started sleeping in Lian’s room, I implied, but I hadn’t the heart to say the words. He understood though. Mack always understood when I couldn’t say something outloud and what it meant when the words got stuck in my mouth.

He kissed the top of my head and his arms settled around me. “Then I’ll stay,” he said simply. “We’ll...work. I don’t want to live like this. I miss...us.”

So did I.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is short. Let me tell you guys, it has been like pulling fucking teeth to get an Atara or Mack chapter out because they're so...not their usual selves. Hopefully, this puts them on the path to a return to semi-normal behavior so it isn't quite as difficult anymore ><
> 
> Additionally, I said this already, but I'll say it again: I can't get these chapters up as quickly as I did the ones in the previous installment because none of this is pre-written and all I have to go off is a basic outline. So please, hang in there. I don't want to let you down D:


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Emory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's back~

My brother had never been the stubborn one. _I_ was the stubborn one--the one so like my father that the comparison was drawn constantly. Too stubborn to cry out when he’d been on the post, too stubborn to forfeit the north, too stubborn to fail in the Marshlands….

Too stubborn to let go of Cyril, to just tell Elizabeth where I’d been sent to, to just _die_ when she’d put a blade through his gut and twisted it into his organs….

After the siege, when the city officially mourned Fox--when the banners hung black over the brutalized walls and the ruined husks of the remaining buildings, when people cried in the streets over the sheer number of bodies on the pyres, when the orphanages filled to bursting and the water in the bay finally ( _finally_ ) ran clear again, Lady Valmont had stood with me on the balcony above the throne room, overlooking my smoldering city, and she’d put her hand on my shoulder.

“You have a spine of steel, Emory Bordelon,” she’d said quietly. “That was what I loved about your father. He never did the easy thing. He did the _right_ thing, even when it hurt.” 

I hadn’t believed her then. At the time, all I’d been able to focus on was the dead. They piled in the streets, bloated and distorted, nameless casualties in a war that had never been theirs. I’d learned something in the aftermath of that chaos that my father had never been able to teach me…that _neither_ of my fathers had ever been able to teach me: That when we played this game of politics, titles, and crowns--we lords and ladies in our castles and our estates, with our packed treasuries, expensive tutors of combat and strategy, ancient Immaran blades passed down from father to son for centuries, and our names crammed full of defining monikers like _Emory the Lion_ , we were not the people who suffered the greatest loss. We were not even usually the ones fighting the wars--my father had never been able to lift a sword, not in all of my life. It was the common people who suffered. They fought and they bled and they died for our political goals and our machinations and when I saw them out there, in my bleeding, mutilated city, something in me changed. I did not want to be Emory the Lion, Emory the Conqueror, Emory the Mad Prince. 

I just wanted to be Emory. Emory, who saw his people fed and housed and cared for in the aftermath of a great horror and having walked through those streets, having witnessed the death and destruction, I became more than what Fox had ever made me. All that strategy I had learned, all that combat training I had endured--it meant nothing. It meant less than nothing.

War would not be the machine that I put gears into and I think, when faced with Atara’s stubborn refusal to let go of his fury over Immara, that was all I could think of. My steel spine had transferred to my brother. Or perhaps transferred was not the correct word. Perhaps my backbone had simply changed, just as steely as before but aimed at protecting my _people_ , not just the ideals that Coria had always upheld, not just the throne, and not just our name. With that crown upon my head and that throne beneath me, I took on the role as the singular protector of all that remained.

And I would hold that door. I would hold it because I knew that on the other side, there were wretched things. There was war and famine and plague and they had suffered enough. They would suffer no more, not because of me. Not because I’d been born under the branching Bordelon tree. 

“You’re protecting your people,” Atara said to me that day--the first day, in fact, since he’d started speaking to me again after his promise to not only respect the child that Nicolette carried, but to treat it as family. To protect it as family. I suspected I had Mackenzie Glenning to thank for his change of heart, or perhaps it had been as Cyril said--something in Atara had broken in the Old Keep. He said that he’d discovered a part of himself he hadn’t known was there, but Mackenzie and I both agreed that he’d discovered nothing. He’d left something behind. He’d lost that youthful idealism that had made him so endearing.

He was hardened, my little brother, like thickened scar tissue or weathered rock, and the daydreams that I had so loved in him were twisted into dark and dangerous ambition. ‘Power,’ my father had told me once, ‘Begets a hunger for more power. It is an unquenchable thirst, a madness, a _sickness_ , and you must keep it caged like the mad dog that it is. Unleash that ambition and fury only when it can be closely controlled, Emory.’

So I watched him, my lips pursed in a thin line, from where I sat atop the cold, bitter throne so soaked in blood that I could almost feel it running down my back every time I sat there. My father’s blood, my cousin’s blood, the blood of tens of thousands of people feeding our dynasty like the monstrosity that it was. Beside me, my brother sat rigid in his own throne, as black and wicked at the core as my own, as soaked in blood as my own, and twice as hungry as the one that burdened me. The polished birch that twisted like a living seat cradled him, incubating his ambition, nursing his fury every time he saw that scar around Ridley’s throat.

Atara took a breath, speaking quietly as the last audience of the day filed from the throne room, leaving us only with each other and our personal councils--Kinnon, Pyrin, and Ridley for him. Mackenzie and Cassiope for me. Sebastian would have been there if I hadn’t sent him north to deal with the Dumas problem, but even if he’d been present, we wouldn’t have seen him from his perch in the rafters above us where he listened and watched, the unseen hand behind my crown.

“You’re protecting your people,” he reiterated. “And I understand that, Em, I do. I know this is a bad time. I know that Coria is healing. Coryth is scarred. The treasury is drained. I _know_ how heavy this is for you to carry on your own.” He implied that absence of Nikita Novak at my side and I shot him a sharp, venomous look, to which he held his hands up in an admission of regrettable guilt. “Try to understand, at least, how this feels for--”

I held a hand up and he scowled, but his lips clamped shut. The way that he listened to me...that he _continued_ to listen to me, even though his position and his station were just as important and powerful as my own, had never ceased to rub his council the wrong way. To Atara, I would always be his older brother. He would always look up to me, and my return to behavior that, while it was not a direct mirror of who I’d been before the beach, was damn close, had only cemented that. 

“I will not feed more lives to the ambition of the gentry,” I responded through my teeth and I shifted in my chair, cold and unforgiving at my back, to fully face him. His eyes met mine, circled by tired bruises that betrayed how terrible his nightmares still were. I knew he’d reconciled, on some level, with Mackenzie, but I also knew that things were not totally normal. It was possible they would never be normal, not after all that my little brother had endured in the siege. “More importantly, tiny,” I continued. “I will not feed _you_ to that ambition. If you go over there and you lose, they will slaughter you. They will make a spectacle of it the way that Elizabeth did to our father. I will _not_ see your head mounted on a city gate in Immara and if that means refusing to assist you in this _asinine_ ploy you’ve got stewing in your head, then so be it. I will not be a warmonger. I have enough fucking blood on my hands, yours included.”

Atara blinked, cheeks flushed over a complexion that betrayed how unwell he truly was, in both body and mind, and his lips parted in something akin to surprise. “I’m not dead, Emory,” he breathed gently and I felt my hackles raise, livid rage breathing up my spine like heat from a fire.

“Aren’t you?” I practically snapped and beside me, Mackenzie moved, his hand landing hard on my shoulder, a warning to stop while I was ahead. He might have agreed with what I was saying (in fact, I knew that he did) but that didn’t mean he approved of the way that I snarled at him, seething and grieving. I’d been grieving for years. “You’re not who you used to be.”

“Neither are you,” he spat back, his expression finally twisting into the same frustration that bubbled in my chest. “You haven’t been. Not since you were twenty-fucking-one and now you’re just drinking yourself into a stupor every day because you can’t deal with Nikki choosing his family over _you_ and why wouldn’t he, Emory? You were a fucking _monster_.”

A younger me...a more furious, more temperamental me, wanted to step from my throne and break his fucking nose like I would have years before. Instead, I just felt the little pieces of my heart start to crack again in a way that only Atara could ever wring out of me. I didn’t talk about Nikita Novak. I _couldn’t_ talk about Nikita Novak. Some vital part of me had remained in the north with him and as much as I tried, as much as I wanted not to hate him (and I’d promised not to hate him) I couldn’t help it. He’d broken promises too--that was how I rationalized away my hatred as being acceptable. 

I’d grieved for him like he was dead, but every moment that I finally told myself that I was done, I was reminded that he wasn’t dead. He hadn’t been ripped away from me the way that Fox had been ripped away from Cyril. He’d _chosen_ to leave me, to send me home without him, to steal the breath from my lungs and the heart that he’d held between his teeth had been shredded when he bit down that day in Ravndal. 

I did not talk about him because once, I’d tasted the rest of my life in his mouth and I’d heard it in his voice those dark, dark days during the siege when I’d been crippled with depression and anxiety, trapped in a hell of my own making. He’d been there for every second of it, lips behind my ear, promising that he’d get me through it. He’d get me through it if he had to drag me out of it like dead weight. 

I didn’t drink because I was angry. I didn’t drink because I was trying to fill a void. I drank because I was hurting, because the wound was still raw, because I was still bleeding out from the hole that he’d left in me and Atara knew it. He knew, as well, that I accepted full responsibility for Nikita’s decision.

I was monstrous. I was wretched and wicked and mad. I deserved to hurt for what I’d put him through.

It was Mackenzie who spoke in my stead, stealing words from my brother’s own mouth. “We’re all monsters, Atara,” he informed him quietly. “You told me that.”

For a moment, I thought my brother might storm from the throne room. He did get to his feet, fingers clenched into white knuckled fists, carrying a beautiful rage in his features that almost thawed how cold I felt toward him in those days and weeks and months after I’d told him about the baby. It reminded me that somewhere beneath his mutilated psyche, _my_ Atara still existed. He still got angry. He still turned dramatic at the drop of a hat. He still readily stomped out of rooms like a toddler throwing a tantrum and it should have infuriated me. It had before, but now it just reminded me of who he’d been back then and how much I would have traded this new version of him for my bratty, entitled little brother.

Instead, the door at the far end of the hall burst open and the guards at the foot of the dais we sat on stepped forward, alternating Corian and Lierian, with two Inquisitors at their flanks. Those black clad, shadow-quiet men stepped out ahead of even the soldiers, fingers curled into fists in gloves that were sewn with steel rings around their fingers. 

As if by instinct, I reached for the blade that was propped beside my throne and my fingers curled around the handle. During the siege, any person that walked into the Novak estate could have been there to kill me--decoys or betrayers sent by Elizabeth Glenning to well and truly destroy my family’s line. Nikita had been the one to remind me, frequently and at length, the importance of always being ready to fight. My father had never kept his blade with him, but that same blade that had once been part of his formal regalia, carried by Tylas himself, was now my constant companion. When I slept, it was tucked beneath the mattress with the handle protruding just enough for me to pull it free of the scabbard. When I sat in Court, it rested against my throne, in easy reach. When I moved around the Keep or the city, it hung at my hip.

I shouldn’t have feared anything. I knew that, especially during the siege when it had been both Nikita and Sebastian at my side. They were fiersome, terrifying men in their own right and for entirely different reasons. If someone happened to get through one of them, I knew they wouldn’t get through the other, but that day, neither of them were there. I was even more anxious and paranoid than usual.

But I recognized the figure that burst through the door, clad in black leather and tattoos, boots suited for riding thudding against polished marble, blonde hair in a curtain that fell over eyes as sharp and lethal as blades. For the briefest of moments, I thought I might melt through the throne and descend into an early grave. My heart surged into my throat and I thought, for just that second, that I would be just as smitten as I had been that first time around. I would throw myself at him, beg him back, plead and rationalize and apologize--

And that moment died, because the similarity ended at the leather and the blonde hair. Our intruder was not Nikita Novak. Of course, it wasn’t. He was in the north, likely married off by then, learning to be Glacia’s Herald and if all went well...if we never went to war again...then I would never see him again. That was good, I’d told myself once. Clean breaks would heal the fastest.

This was not Nikita, but it was close. It was Danica Bordelon, previously Danica Novak. His sister, and the wife of my uncle, Riordan, who followed close at her heels with a retinue of guards wearing the colors of Southwatch: Violet and gold, regal and royal the way that my uncle had always fashioned himself to be.

The contingent in front of us settled back with a sharp order from Cassie Perondale to stand down and my Second descended down the stairs to the dais where the thrones sat, ivory gown sweeping out behind her like a gauzy mist. 

“Lady Bordelon,” she began gently, and I questioned her tone at first, but one look at Danica’s face told me that my aunt (how utterly _bizarre_ to think of her as that, given her age and who her brother was) was beyond hysterical. The war paint on her face was streaked from the humidity of the wet season and from what, at first glance, I thought to be sweat from the sheer heat of the south, but I soon recognized to be tears. Angry, bitter, _violent_ tears.

The Novaks did not cry easily. None of the northmen did, but Vasilev Novak had beaten fear into his children until they were so guarded and separate from their emotions that they barely seemed to feel them at all. When they did, however, it was always to the highest degree. Nikita had not succumbed to tears or joy with ease, but when he had, he’d given it all of himself in those moments. He felt all that he’d been bottling, like being swallowed by a tidal wave and sucked out to sea, and I could see in her that she was that that point.

“Where is he?” she demanded, pushing past Cassie so that my Immaran advisor stumbled and only barely caught herself with Riordan’s help. His arm wrapped around her back and kept her from landing on her tailbone, stack of parchment in her arms and all, and she cast him a quick, worried glance, before he strode past her as well. 

“Dani--” he started, but she gestured wildly, storming up the stairs to stand directly in front of me.

Danica Novak, for she was, at her core, still a Novak, would have been able to slaughter every person in that throne room without so much as breaking a sweat. She was just as ruthless and talented as her older brother at the art of war and slaughter. They were butchers of the human body, weapons crafted not only by a culture that valued violence above all other things, but by the sheer horror of who their father was. If Nikita had suffered, then so had she. I knew this to be a fact.

So when the smallest of the blades on her ritual Commander’s armor pressed to the hollow of my throat, I knew that I would either give her an answer that satisfied her, or I would die there. My blood would be added to the blood that watered the throne, as if it weren’t already there, and so would that of everyone that stood between her and me.

Riordan’s fingers wrapped around her wrist a second later and though my heart beat like a drum in my chest and my brother was at his feet, mercy blade in his hand, I did not move. Atara did. He slashed forward, quick and sharp as any of the Lierian soldiers, and Danica moved twice as fast. Her free hand caught his wrist and bent--bent until I knew it was sprained and the blade clattered to the marble, my brother with it, arm still held aloft by her fingers. He twisted, biting through his lip instead of screaming. The guards moved.

“Stop,” I ordered stiffly and she stared at me when the sound of their armor grated to a halt. “Danica, let him go and we can talk about whatever it is that I’ve done to piss you off.”

“Where is he?” she demanded again, her voice trembling. “I know this is where he would come, Emory Bordelon, don’t you fucking lie to me. _Where is he?_ ” The last phrase was repeated in Glacian, guttural and brutal as the people it hailed from, but I understood enough to know what she said. I’d learned it as a child and Nikita had polished it as much as he could, though he told me that my accent was atrocious and he would absolutely not call me fluent. 

Riordan glanced between me and his wife and he took a deep, steadying breath. “Danica,” he repeated. “ _Please_. Do not make me choose between you and my king. My _nephew_.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dani,” I promised her. “If someone is lost, I can help you find them, but you need to put that knife down.”

Her eyes were wild, as untamed and vicious as the land that had breathed life to her, but they were broken, too. She was in _pain_ \--brutal, unimaginable pain, but she believed me. It took a moment and all I could feel was that cold steel pressed to my throat. For several seconds, I was certain that I would die there, and then she lowered it slowly, glancing around at the occupants of the room, her other hand finally releasing Atara. Mackenzie gathered him up, fingers around his wrist, quietly repeating, “You’re okay, I’ve got you,” while he massaged life back into the twisted muscle around my brother’s hand.

“You’re lucky Sebastian wasn’t here,” Cassie shot at them as she stepped back to the throne, positioning herself to my left. “You’d both have been shot from the rafters without a question.”

Danica didn’t even bother to sneer at her the way that I expected her to. Riordan, however, opened his mouth to do so and only stopped when Dani spoke again. Her words turned me cold from my skin to my core with a frigid, icy horror that spread over my limbs. “My brother, Emory,” she breathed. “Nikki left Ravndal.”

“He _what_?” Mack stammered the words, sitting my brother back down in his throat with a tightly wrapped spool of linen around his hand. 

“They’ll hunt him down,” Cassie added quietly. “That is their custom, is it not? Anyone who deserts is branded a traitor and hunted down.”

Danica stared at me, their questions unanswered. She didn’t need to answer them. I could see the words in her face, but she withdrew a folded piece of parchment from her armor and threw it into my lap. I did not bother to touch it. I already knew what it would say and Danica, after a moment of hesitation, spoke with a gravel threaded voice. “He refused to marry the girl,” she explained. “He spurned tradition. They exiled him with a day’s start and then sent the Riders to hunt him down. That letter is from my mother. She said he was coming _here_ , Emory. To you. A Rider returned with the head of my brother’s horse.”

“He would never abandon Annika,” I said the words quietly, glancing down at Tielo, who slept near my feet despite the chaos around him. 

“He should be here by now,” she added. “Even if they killed his horse, he should be here by now and he’s not, is he?”

I swallowed, my tongue thick in my mouth and my face slowly draining of color. I couldn’t find the words and so Atara spoke for me. “No, Dani. He never made it here.”

“Emory,” Danica whispered my name like it was a plea and I already knew what she would ask. It was an absurd question--the Glacians assigned no value to the dead. She should not have cared, but she did. I could hear it in the way that she spoke. “I cannot accept him dying unless I see a body. I _need_ proof. My brother would not go down easily. Someone will know something.”

Silence fell over us and my head blossomed with an ache that matched my heart. I hurt. I hurt all over like I’d been used as a battering ram and I felt, as if by magic, a level of exhaustion so profound that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stand. I wanted to simultaneously vomit and scream. My entire person rebelled so vehemently against the idea of him being dead. Away was different. Separate from me was different.

Dead...no. I could hear in my head my own voice repeating, ‘Not him. Anyone but him. Take _me_ before you take him.’

“Lady Brighton,” I managed thickly. “Please send word to Sebastian. Have him looking.”

“Emory,” Atara interjected. “Sebastian is one man. _Barely_ even a man. He can’t search an entire country.”

“He doesn’t have to,” I answered flatly. “There is only one route in and out of Glacia that is not flooded during the melt. Tell him to start south of there, at Floodwater. There’s an Inn called the Fox and the Hound.”

“I’ll meet him there,” Danica added and I knew by her tone that she would insist whether I argued or not. Riordan tried, but she repeated herself. “No, Ri, I lost my sister to that tyrant we call our father. I will not lose my brother, too, and if I have...if I have, then I am bringing him back to Coryth and I will throw his bones in the water like the Corians do or I will burn them to ash like the Lierians. Whatever Emory decides he wants done to himself, I will do with Nikki.”

And with that, she brushed by him like he wasn’t there, storming back for the entrance to the hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! If you're still sticking with me from before, thanks for being patient. If you're new, thanks for joining us! I should be around fairly more frequently now. Here's a breakdown of where I've been, in the event that you care:  
> 1\. Writer's block is a bitch.  
> 2\. I found out a friend of mine was hit by a drunk driver in a really terrible accident. There is more information about that on my tumblr, but the short of it is that she suffered a traumatic brain injury, a stroke, and her seat belt damn near cut her in half. She's paralyzed on her left side, but she's in therapy and has regained her use of speech. It was just...a lot to deal with.  
> 3\. My dog died. :c He was 15 and had the big C word. We adopted a puppy a few weeks ago though and he consumes all of my time. And also all of my belongings.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Mackenzie

I’d watched Emory plummet once before into the state that I saw him immediately, violently enter when Danica came bursting through the throne room, all wildfire and livid rage. I’d expected him to lash out, to punish her insolence the way that he probably should have, given his position and her behavior, but the break in him was almost audible when she said the words. It had been hard to see him stumble when he returned to Coryth without Nikki--he’d been so stable and so strong for so _long_ by then, like a pillar holding up the weight of the world, teeth grinding against the heaviness of the burden. I’d seen the small fissures in him open up since then, but this...this was different.

This was a gaping wound, torn open and laid bare, and all those vehement, liquor-laden proclamations about how much he _hated_ Nikki turned sour in my mouth before they disappeared to ash.

Emory Bordelon could never hate Nikita Novak, not even if he spent his entire life trying, and I knew that when Riordan followed Danica out of the throne room, no doubt trying to persuade his hard-headed spouse that riding north was a bad idea. My focus remained on the king, however, who crumbled like a sculpture of dry sand. I swore, in those moments, I could hear Emory’s heartbeat, the steady pounding that provided the lifeblood of Coria, and it was increasing in speed like a war drum, staccato and echoing. Beside him, Atara reached tentatively with his good hand and was rewarded with his older brother recoiling like the touch might sear him down to his bone.

He was dissolving. Fast. Dissolving like he had during the siege after Fox had been put out to sea...when Emory had been crippled by his own mind, curled up in bed. Alone. In the dark.

Not alone, I corrected. He had never been alone. Nikita had been there, every day, forcing him to bathe and to eat.

This was the reason that Atara stayed in the wretched Keep. He’d said it to me a thousand times by then because I’d been trying to convince him for years to go west with me, to settle in the estate in the Glens, far, far away from everything that had destroyed him and it was almost funny. The Glens had been my mother’s seat. Every inch of it was saturated with her, but neither of us had ever been there. It did not hold the memories that the Winter Palace held.

Still, he remained and when the group dispersed, I found myself funneling both of the Bordelon brothers to Tristan’s rooms with Cassie in two. That cedar wood board she carried with the candle melted into the top lip was crooked in her right arm and she was scribbling away with her left on a sheet of parchment, dipping her quill furiously into a pot of ink that was sealed to the lip with the same wax as the candle. Her heels clicked and, perched on her shoulder was that massive bird of Sebastian’s. Not Commandant. Commandant went everywhere with the young Lord Brighton, Grand Inquisitor of the Corian Court. This was _Scarlet_ , more Cassie’s bird than his--a red-belly falcon who was black as pitch except when she inhaled and her feathers bristled along her chest, revealing a scarlet undercoat. 

I’d never thought of birds as particularly bright, but these creatures were not simple birds. They were trained hunters and trackers who, as if by some unknowable sixth sense, seemed to _understand_ when they were spoken to the way that Tielo seemed to understand Emory.

“I’ll send Etienne and Linnea north with Danica,” she spoke, but she didn’t really seem to be addressing anyone in particular. “Surely Riordan will be going back to Southwatch. They seem to have left their daughter there.” Cassie clicked her tongue and stole a glance in my direction, but I shrugged in response. Riordan Bordelon did not share his plans with any of us, but I’d never known his family to rely on nannies to raise their children. Atara was vehemently against them unless they were absolutely necessary for some formal gathering that required the attendance of both of us. Lian had had a wet nurse for just a year, and since then it had been, for the most part, just his immediately family with him--me, Atara, Emory, and Cyril. Cassie and Sebastian on rare occasion.

The Immaran girl huffed, blowing a lock of hair the color of spun gold out of her face as we finally turned the corner toward Tristan’s rooms.

Atara had his good arm looped through Emory’s and he was speaking, quietly and in that ancient, noble dialect of Corian that only the gentry spoke. I understood chunks of it, if only because it didn’t branch too far off from the common tongue, but his tone was steady and low. Reassuring, the way he spoke to me after a nightmare or the way he whispered against the top of Lian’s head when he’d skinned his knees, the child gathered in his lap and rocked while he cried. 

When Nikita did not return with Emory, I had never been able to hold it against him. I’d seen the extent of what Emory had done to him--the scars, the blood soaked sheets, the bite marks, the ligature marks...he’d been, as Atara had pointed out, _monstrous_ and unnecessarily cruel. Brutal. Horrifying on a level that would have earned anyone without his privilege a sentencing on the post. I could not blame Nikita for choosing a terror that he knew how to navigate over one that seemed unpredictable. 

But for this reason...for _this_ \--having to watch Atara play the steady hand to Emory while he took a nosedive back into his own head--I hated him for this. It was wrong. I knew that, because Atara would always be there to push Emory back upright if he ever fell down. Even if Nikita had been around, the Infinito would have come back to Court at the first sign of his brother faltering. They were family, bound in blood and shared memories, sealed together by an event that had destroyed parts of both of them. There was nobody alive that would ever understand what Emory had survived on the beach. We could look at the wounds, certainly. We could measure the sickness and the scar tissue, but we would never really know.

Atara came the closest. He had been there. He had witnessed it play out in all its tragic horror and been the first person to lift that battered body out of the sand and _demand_ that he keep breathing. 

“You’ll be okay,” he whispered, slipping back into the common dialect as we closed in on Tristan’s door. “Whether he is or he isn’t, Emory, you’re going to be okay. I’ll still be here.”

“I should have gone north and burned that whole fucking country,” the King mumbled, his voice thick with guilt and regret, but it was anger that spoke. Emory’s reign had been ushered in by tragedy and war, but he was not a war machine. He did not believe the horrors of war to be a reasonable cost for the crown and it ate him alive that the people of Coryth had suffered so completely on behalf of his family. No matter how much he wanted to ride north and destroy that wretched kingdom, he never would.

Atara clicked his tongue and his shoulder hit the door, jarring it open without knocking, not that Tristan ever cared. He was exactly where he always was--at his desk, surrounded by books in dead languages, spindles of magic stretched around his fingers as he examined a text so old that it appeared to be scrawled over ancient, stretched vellum. Emory had given him the task of emptying out the old Immaran temples and deciphering the books that they held, transferring them to new bindings or new parchments if they were too old with rot. 

His bright eyes, so vibrantly blue that they nearly glowed like his magic, looked up through a messy fringe of rust colored curls. According to Sebastian, Tristan’s hair had been a light, strawberry blond as a child. The covenant had stained it. 

I had never been able to imagine him like that--Tristan was Tristan. An alchemist who, by nature of the bond forged between him and the dead gods, was not entirely a mortal. He should not have looked like a mortal...and he didn’t.

“Oh, a whole flock of you today,” he exclaimed, dropping the sheet in his fingers. The sparking colors faded from his hands and he stepped out from around his desk, zeroing in immediately on Atara’s limp hand, slowly turning purple about the joint. “May I?”

I’d had preconceptions about Immarans. In fact, when I’d met Tristan, I’d hated him purely based on the stereotypes I’d grown up with. I’d fashioned him a slaver--brutal and cruel, with no regard for life and no personality beyond a cliche villain. I’d thought the same of his brother and Cassiope Perondale. 

Tristan would have died for any man, woman, or child on the street, regardless of who they were. If his life was what it cost to save them, he would have given it and he’d come close to that in the days following the siege. Had Ridley not returned to remind him that he had people to live for, he might have spent every bit of his magic and started burning off what was left to keep him alive.

Sebastian _was_ brutal and cruel, but he’d never owned a slave. He didn’t even keep his birds tied down or in cages. He never killed without an order and he preferred parties to his actual job--singing, dancing, drinking. He could _sing_ , too. He and Cassie both.

And Cassie...Cass was just a brilliant mind born into a body that was deemed inferior in Immara. Women were objects to be bartered off in their homeland, married up to strengthen the family bonds, often married to other members of the same family. She was proud. Ambitious. Devastatingly beautiful the way that the Perondales were rumored to be, but so sharp that how pretty she was didn’t matter. She could (and had) disassembled entire families with lineages that went back ages for plotting against the new King and she’d done it all before afternoon tea was served and without smearing her lipstick.

The Brightons--all three of them--were the most powerful weapons in Emory’s entire arsenal.

The point, however, in that moment, was that Tristan never used the magic he could so easily call upon without first receiving explicit consent and Atara gave it when he held his bent wrist out to him. “Danica visited,” he lamented.

“Danica did this to you?” the alchemist asked and the spread of blue spidered out over bruising flesh, sinking down into bone. The bruises faded and Atara’s fingers twitched back to life. Tristan’s eyes slid over to Emory, who had found himself an old, brocade chair with a winged back to curl up in. He was pressed into it, as if trying to make himself as unnoticeable as possible. Beside me, Cassie broke off into Immaran, clipped and quiet, but I recognized the name _Nikita_ in her speech. 

When Atara’s arm was released, he made his way back to me briefly, one hand wrapping around my forearm and squeezing before he pulled a stool up in front of Emory’s chair. The king was quiet, eyes unfocused and staring vacantly out a window that looked over the gardens. He’d planted roses there himself after they’d retaken the Keep--roses, clivia, ginger, and apple trees.

Tielo, who had silently followed all of us, put his big, long-eared head in Emory’s lap and nosed at his fingers until a palm rested on top of his head, utterly still. 

“I…” Tristan started quietly. “I cannot search for someone that I don’t share blood with.” His tone was almost apologetic, but it wouldn’t have mattered. At that point, I knew that Emory had withdrawn. I recognized the person in that chair not as the man that had become the glue that pulled his floundering family back together and the pillar of reason for a kingdom on the brink of collapse, but as the waif-like boy I’d known after the beach. He had turned entirely inward, as if he could convince himself that none of this was truly happening, and I could only imagine the thoughts in his head.

If Nikita had never come south, if he’d never met Emory, if they’d never been bound together by the traumas they’d survived and by Milena’s horrific end, then Nikita would have never fled Ravndal. 

Carefully, Atara reached for his brother’s balled up fist--the hand that was not resting on Tielo--and gently removed the wadded up parchment that Danica had thrown at him. He handed it off to me, but the script on the page was foreign. Runic, like the tattoos that roped down Nikki and Dani’s arms, weaving around that Novak sea snake that began at their wrists and ended at their shoulders.

Tristan took it from me with slow hands, his eyes scanning the page as Cassie strode across the room, threw open the window, and sent Scarlet soaring out with an order given sharply in Immaran and a letter tied to her leg.

“Are you going to read it out loud?” she asked, huffing after a moment and sitting down on top of Tristan’s desk. 

The alchemist shot her a glare. “Glacian is difficult to sort through. You know this. It’s almost like trying to make sense of a picture book without any words.”

“I can read it,” Emory muttered, stirred from his stillness by the lure of more information. It was almost as if he’d forgotten he was holding that letter, but their voices cut through his melancholy and his paranoia. Tristan handed the parchment back to him.

“This first character is new. I think it’s probably her name,” he explained quietly, his voice thick like his throat was catching. “It says they arranged a...a suitable marriage between him and a Marsher girl. Penelope Rosewood, I think? The names are difficult.”

“Rosewood makes sense,” I finally spoke. “His mother is a Rosewood, isn’t she? Probably a distant cousin looking to marry up. That’s not uncommon in the gentry, is it? I mean, how many cousins married each other in the Bordelon line?”

Atara snorted and Cassie laughed quietly, though it lacked a distinct mirth. “Cousins is distant for Immara. My parents were siblings.” Her voice was flat and Atara made a face, disgust in his features that roused a choked chuckle from Tristan.

Silence fell again then and Emory’s brow knitted over mint colored eyes. “He refused to marry her,” he continued, grimacing as he struggled through the runes on the page, tilting his head and pulling it closer to try to gauge which symbols aligned with which words--I’d been told that Glacian was a contextual language. Symbols changed meaning depending on the symbols around them and those words could have entirely different definitions if used in different settings. “He...refused because…”

I saw him in that moment, as if every nerve in him had been suddenly exposed to air, live and raw and Emory’s resolved buckled like rotting wood no longer able to bear weight. He snapped, broken like kindling, and his legs lifted into the chair so that he could press them to his chest.

Tristan took the letter back and Emory dissolved, hands pressed tight over his face, rocking in his seat, and near him, Atara became anxious. He stood and sat, fingers hovering over his brother, and I could feel my heart twist and crack. 

He’d done so well since the siege--Emory had. He’d been everything that Coria had needed, that the Bordelons had needed, and he’d never once wavered from the duty that Fox had left behind for him. I’d been _proud_ of how far he’d come and how close he’d been to dying--and he’d pulled it all back, put himself together, and come back to Coryth like the avenging prodigal son that they’d needed.

All it had taken was the possibility--the _probability_ \--of Nikita Novak being dead to send him hurtling off the cliff toward self-destruction.

“Emory,” Cassie warned softly, kneeling beside the chair he was on, one arm looped over Tielo’s back. Her fingers dug into the wrinkled flesh--Tielo had _so many_ wrinkles--and she scratched with gold lacquered nails. “You can’t fall apart like this. It changes nothing.”

“It changes everything,” he hissed from behind his hands and Atara looked up at me, helplessness on his face, pleading. As if I would know how to handle this...as if I had some measure of knowledge that they didn’t have. I’d been through things similar to what Emory had suffered, but nothing like this. The threat of losing Atara had been there, but I’d never thought he was dead. If anyone in that room could understand what he felt, it was _Atara_ , not me. He’d believed I was dead, after all. Believed it so deeply and on such a profound level that it had taken weeks for him to believe that I was really truly real.

I took a breath. I’d try. For the youngest prince, I would try. “Boss,” I began gently. “Strategy. You need a _plan_ to get through this. One day at a time, just like before.”

Cassie stood slowly and one hand fell on my shoulder as she passed me. She leaned in, her lips practically against my ear. “I’ll write to Josephine and Meyer. Maybe Joey visiting will help. Shall I include Lysander?”

I nodded curtly. Atara was in no mental state to rule in his brother’s stead. Emory was fast devolving. Cassie would never be trusted by the court as a whole, not without Emory in a stable position to back her.

And so it fell to me as the Lord of the Treasury. 

Tristan cleared his throat. “The letter says he refused to marry Penelope Rosewood, because he could never _love_ Penelope Rosewood. He told his father about Emory and left for the south with intentions of making it to Coryth. I assume to throw himself at the King’s mercy.”

“He should have written to me,” Emory choked. “I would have gone north to take him from that miserable fucking hellscape!”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Cassie began slowly. “You all know him better, after all, but Nikki Novak never struck me as a person who would ask someone to save him. He would do it alone or die trying.”

Emory made a strangled, horrified noise and Atara shot her a glare that, if looks could kill, would have struck her dead. “You need some fucking sensitivity training, Perondale,” he snapped bitterly.

“Brighton,” Cassie corrected with a shrug. “Look, I’m married to an assassin and Nikita is the only person that ever actually scared him in combat. I don’t think that man is dead. I think it would take a fucking army to kill that Commander, not a handful of horse lords and if anyone can find him, Sebastian can. He found Paikea.”

“Not an easy feat,” Tristan agreed tacitly, but he was glaring at her the same way that Atara was. “I’ll write to Caius. There’s a scryer at the Cathedral. She might be able to seek him out with better luck than I have. Do you have anything that belonged to him, Emory?”

Emory was silent, brow furrowed, and I could see his mind work behind his eyes, mentally cataloging belongings. He shook his head first and then his lips parted, as if in surprise. “What if it didn’t belong to him, but he gave it to me? When Fox died, Nikita had his coat cleaned and resewn for me. I have the Glacian crown, too. It wasn’t his, but if they still had a monarchy, he’d be their Crown Prince.”

“I can’t send a crown via bird to Paikea, but a scrap of the coat may work well enough,” Tristan offered quickly, moving back around to his desk and rifling through drawers. “I’ll try it myself first. It has been...years since I’ve scryed for anything and Seeing is not really my area, but I did _know_ him.”

This...this hope that he gave in that moment seemed to give Emory some kind of fervent energy. He pushed himself up and out of his chair and made a quick line for the door, scrubbing at his face as he walked and something unwelcome twisted in my stomach. 

I’d thought Lysander had made him healthy. I’d thought he was _different_ , but the co-dependency he still had with Nikita was alarming, given the time and distance between them. It had been enough, evidently, to know that he was alive but now that this… _this_ was there...it was different. There was a hunger in his expression when he brushed by me and an anger that I hadn’t seen in years.

Atara leapt up after him and when the door slammed shut behind the king, the Infinito looked back at me. “I can’t leave him alone right now,” he told me anxiously.

“I know.”

“You’ll look after Lian? I’ll try to be back later tonight, but…” He made a face, a grimace, both apologetic and frustrated at the same time.

I nodded in response and Atara hopped forward, kissing me quickly on the corner of my mouth before he vanished from the room.

There was quiet between us for a long, heavy minute and then Cassie spoke, her voice gentle but dripping with concern.

“How long will it take Joey Valmont to get here from Eden?”

“Two weeks,” Tristan answered softly. “Two weeks too long.” He paused. “Do you really think Nikita is alive?”

A pin could have been heard hitting the floor a mile away. I _did_ hear Cassie swallow and I looked back at her, her cedar wood board on the desk and a handful of her dress twisted between her palms.

“No.” Tristan winced and I remained expressionless, watching her when her face twisted into sorrow. “But Emory is the only option we have for a monarch. Atara is _wildly_ unstable and...war with Immara right now would end in ruins for Coria. Emory is all that stands between us and Atara’s _insane_ agenda. I’m sorry, Mackenzie--”

“You’re right,” I agreed with a shrug. “I never thought I’d be the person saying Emory is the more stable, more clinically sane of the two of them...but right now, even with this, he is. I have Atara convinced that war with Immara _right now_ is a bad idea, but that’ll only last so long.”

“Isolation--” Tristan started, one hand out like he sought to comfort me and I jerked back from the touch, which elicited a flinch from him. 

I ground my teeth. “I _know_ what isolation does, Tris. I’m fucking sleeping next to it. We _cannot_ let Emory relapse back into this. I don’t care if that means the world’s biggest supply of bourbon and an endless march of whores. Emory, at least, can be reasoned with. Atara will destroy us.”

“I’ll see to it that Cyril is informed,” Tristan offered. “Perhaps Emory staying with him and Nicolette for awhile is a good idea. If Emory takes a turn for the worst, we’ll need to devise a way to separate Atara from Coryth. If someone needs to rule in Emory’s stead, we cannot have his younger brother vying for that position.”

“He’s next in line,” Cassie interjected.

“No, he isn’t,” Tristan answered, his voice barely above a whisper. “Nicolette’s child is a boy and he does not carry the Infinito gene. He will not be marked. I can feel it when I examine her. If Nikita is dead, we need to keep Emory from finding out until that child comes. If we can convince him to legitimize the boy…”

It felt wrong. This plotting and scheming behind Atara’s back--like I was gutting him in secret, but Cassie and Tristan were right. I could love him until the end of my days, but he would never be who he had been before the siege. That part of him was dead and gone, even more so than Emory prior to the beach. Emory’s trauma was a few brief minutes in the span of his entire life and it was horrific. It was sickening and terrible and not an event that I would ever wish on anyone.

But Atara’s spanned months. Months of isolation, hallucinations, delirium--these were not things that people recovered from. Not completely. I had always known that. I was _okay_ with it and I knew, without question, that he was not done healing. He would get closer to the boy I’d loved in the beginning--the boy who had grown into a powerhouse of a leader, prepared to destroy entire worlds for his people because he _loved_ them. I knew that’s where it came from. We all did.

Unfortunately, love was not the world’s moral compass.

“Nicolette doesn’t want the child legitimized,” I pointed out.

“She’s not going to survive labor,” Tristan answered casually, but his face was grim and I blinked at him. “Her heart is malformed. The strain on it is already too much. I...did not inform her. It seemed cruel to frighten her when she should happy right now.”

“Tristan!” Cassie exclaimed, her face going pale as glue and she looked at me, as if I should have some opinion on this.

For a moment, I considered it. “I agree with him,” I eventually conceded. “But Nicolette dying could send Emory off again.”

Another long, pregnant pause settled around the three of us and Tristan took a deep breath. “Then I suggest we all pray to whatever gods we believe in that the birth of his son is enough to dampen that emotional response...because if it isn’t...we’re looking at war with Immara.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narrator: Nikita

I could not stay in bed. Remaining stationary had never been a strong point of mine and, where I came from, it wasn’t acceptable. Even injured, you were _expected_ to help out in some fashion--plaiting leather armor, looking after children, cooking, cleaning-- _anything_. Tanner insisted otherwise, reminding me of things that Mackenzie and Tristan would have said. 

‘Broken bones can cause blood clots, Nik.’ 

‘You’ll heal slower if you keep getting up like that, Nik.’

‘I told you to take it easy, Nik.’

It became a daily routine and routine was welcome for me. I thrived on it. It was how we survived in Glacia. There was no margin for error and so every day was meticulously arranged, every event had a detailed set of rules, _everything_ was routine. I welcomed the aches then--the ones that came with hauling myself to my feet in the morning when Tanner was already gone, dragging wooden furniture around his little one room cottage. They moved inches at a time, my brace scraping on the wood floors with a groaning, creaking noise. 

I took to making arrows. It was what I was good at and Tanner used them up, hunting in the sparse highlands after the thaws when the animals were just coming out of their winter burrows or returning from trips south, scraggly and thin. I crafted them in northern fashion, wicked thin with dart like tips aimed to pierce clean through, fletched in black and white with a red tail feather.

“Why the red?” Tanner asked one evening, his wide-framed form hunched over a bubbling pot of stewing winter berries he’d found that morning. He cooked them down with water and honey, sealed them into jars, and put them up on the shelves that surrounded his little home. I’d cataloged those jars my first few days there, trying to get a feel for the man that had taken me in like a little lost lamb. There were berries, vegetables, barks, ciders--all of them canned and sealed with expert fingers in a fashion I’d only ever seen Tristan do in the south, although Tristan’s little Jars of Death were significantly more macabre with their pickled pig fetuses. 

I looked up from the jar he’d set me to cleaning (they had to be _immaculate_ he claimed, and my hands were much smaller than his.) Once it was sufficiently scrubbed of any collected dust, it would be boiled and dried, filled with whatever he was making, sealed shut, and pressurized through exposure to heat. He would pour wax on top and it would go right on the shelf.

“So that I always knew which kills were mine in battle,” I explained quietly and Tanner watched me, brow knit in contemplation. The side of me that he had seen in the two or three weeks since I’d arrived was the side that Emory knew--caring, careful Nikita Novak, constantly in an uphill struggle to balance the scale between the good and the bad that I’d done in my life and never coming up anywhere close to what I wanted. I couldn’t make up for what had happened to Mila, no matter how much I struggled to.

Tanner, however, had seen the scars when he’d cleaned me up and there’d been moments when I could see that asking about them was just on the tip of his tongue, but he’d duck his head and go back to his work, ever respectful of the boundaries between us.

He was sweet, my rescuer, and kind in a way I had not encountered in anyone except, perhaps, Tristan Brighton and maybe Emory on his good days. On his good days, the king had the widest, most open arms of anyone I’d ever known and the reports from the south only made me more certain that I’d been right in what I’d seen in him beyond the broken bits.

He was a _good_ man, the King of Coria. Better than I could ever hope to be by miles.

I did not deserve him or his forgiveness.

Tanner stirred the contents of his bubbling pot, lifted it from the flames, and carefully moved on to the other stages of his process. His hands were enormous, twice mine, easily, and calloused from the hard labor of isolated survival. There were scars on the backs of them from stray ashes in fires long past, lifted by billowing smoke and from skinning knives gone rogue...from cutting wood and crafting furniture. They told a lonely story that reminded me of Coryth--of people I’d stabbed in the back. Of Mackenzie Glenning, surrounded by people his entire life, but utterly, totally alone and of Atara Bordelon, who had always preferred the company of his books and his journals to that of living people.

And Emory, whose demons had been his closest friends for so fucking long.

Tanner took a breath, pointedly ignoring the fact that my hands had stilled on the jar in them while he spooned jellied fruit into the ones already cleaned and boiled. “You’ve seen a lot of battle then? I mean, I know you’re a Commander. I saw the tattoos...you just don’t seem like the killing sort.”

I shrugged, my shattered leg extended in front of me, still strapped tightly to a pine backboard and cradled by more planks, the knee joint snuggly wrapped to keep me from bending it. “I never liked it,” I admitted, setting the jar down and dropping the towel on top of it. He’d filled the others with the contents of the pot and, at the time, did not require more. I stacked it neatly with the other empties, the lid carefully returned to the top. “I knew very young that I would never live up to what my father wanted from me, not completely, so I tried to make up for it by being even better at the things I _could_ do...and I’m very good at killing.”

“Most lords are,” Tanner answered, and for the first time since I’d met him, his broad shoulders bunched in irritation and his voice took on an acidic, frustrated tone. The empty pot was discarded carelessly, which was unlike him. Tanner was careful in everything he did. Every movement was measured, as if he put great thought into absolutely everything before he committed to it. This, however, almost felt like judgement. It also gave me more reason to suspect that he did, in fact, know exactly who I was. Or, if not exactly, he had a good idea of it.

Still, he chose to let me keep my secrets. 

He was quiet and I filled the uncomfortable void with a tentative question to quell the twisting anxiety in my chest that made me want to wring my hands or reach for my blade. “Who is the lord here? We’re too far south for the Rosewoods, aren’t we?”

“Dumas,” Tanner supplied thickly. “Right bastard, that one. Glad he’s dead.”

“Dead?” He hadn’t been dead when I’d left. In fact, he’d been in a sort of standoff with my father over the mining rights above Ravndal. We guarded those long tunnels like they were the mouths of hell and, in fact, there was some truth to it. The deeper they went, the colder and more difficult to breathe it became, until the body simply succumbed to suffocation or hypothermia, even in winter gear. There’d been letters dispatched south to the king in hopes that Emory would sort the whole sordid mess out on his end, and from what I’d understood, he _had_.

Evidently, I’d missed some things in my absence.

Tanner put the jars into an iron box that was covered in coals, waited patiently for the tops to pop, and then poured the wax over them. They were moved up to the shelves then, all without him answering me, but I recognized that this part of the process required silence. When he did spoke, it was quite simple. “Yes, dead,” he answered. “And good fucking riddance.”

I arched an eyebrow and glanced at the shutters over the windows, damp from the storm that raged outside. They clattered there, like someone was banging their fists against the window frame. The whole house trembled with it and I breathed it in, the familiar, nostalgia-inducing smell of rain on fresh, new grass just shaking free of ice and snow. It reminded me of the rain soaked evenings in Coryth, tangled in sheets that smelled of bourbon and sandalwood, with Emory’s warm body draped like a living blanket over mine. When it was quiet and I was lonely, I could still tap out the cadence of his sleeping heartbeat. 

Tanner was grinding his teeth, cheeks red beneath dark stubble. “He was a miserable old prick,” he grumbled eventually. “There were rumors he was amassing an army to pierce north. Burn that village by the mines and claim them as his.”

I snorted. “Ravndal,” I supplied the name of my old home. No, not home, I corrected myself. It had never really been a home. “He’d have had a hard time getting through the legion, but southerners tend to think the stories about us are just _stories_. You did, after all.”

My companion scrubbed his cooking pot in a basin of water and hung it up from the ceiling near a bundle of dried sage and then moved back to the chair at the table I was seated at. He sank into his own gratefully. Tanner was always exhausted--he got up with the sun and was out until it sank over the horizon. Checking snares and traps, fishing, hunting, clearing out the garden behind his little home so that he could plant the jar of seeds he had on the middle of the table. Then it was home to gut and skin, cook and dry--to start the tanning process on hides, to hang the meat in the little hot house in the back where he would smoke it slowly all night until it dried to jerky….

I hated that I couldn’t help him. I hated it more in this exact moment every day, when he finally sat down, head propped in his hand, and he’d talk to me for ten or so minutes before he dragged himself off to bed to start it all over again.

The north had been hard, but we’d never been alone, and watching Tanner gave me a new appreciation for the way they’d drilled it into our heads that one weak link in our village could mean destruction for every one of us.

“Hardly matters now,” he drawled. “He’s dead. Found him in his bed a few mornings ago with his throat cut wide. Kara told me about it this morning when I went to sell her some of the rabbits I’d gotten in the snares. His heir has taken over now and the staff at the estate’s claiming all sorts of wild things.”

I watched him, silent and suspicious, and Tanner watched me, too, as if he were waiting for some reaction that he wasn’t going to get. “They said,” he eventually continued. “That the king had him offed so he could control the Dumas family through the heir. They _said_ it was probably that pet Immaran King Emory keeps.”

“Sebastian Brighton,” I supplied his name without much thought and Tanner’s eyes widened just a fraction as if some great curtain had finally lifted. I bit down on my tongue, choosing to focus instead on the grain of the wood in the table as an uneasy quiet descended on us.

He knew. He had to know.

“How involved with the siege were you, Nik?” he implored after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence. 

I owed him honesty and I remembered, quite distinctly, how that very Sebastian Brighton that we were speaking of had laughed and called me a terrible liar one day before we’d gotten through the walls. I’d liked Bash. I doubted very much that he liked me anymore, not with all I’d done and what Emory was sure to have put them through, but I’d felt some kind of kinship with him. He’d fled a disastrous home life and a wicked father that had beaten and broken him, worn him down to ‘weak and worthless.’ Those had been the words he’d used when he talked about what Rafael had made him into. ‘Weak and worthless, so scared to go home that I’d make myself sick just thinking about it.’

I knew that feeling. I knew it _well_. Vasilev had not made me weak and worthless, though. He’d made me a hardened weapon, forged in violence and tempered when I’d thrown Milena out into the snow, effectively tying the noose for her. If I were a weapon, I’d been quenched in her blood. He’d beaten and broken me and forced me to fight.

I’d learned to be violent so that he’d stop. Sebastian had learned to be violent so that he could reclaim his own worth. I had yet to do that.

But we weren’t so different, the assassin and I.

I ran my thumb along the wood, my eyes following the grain like the rippled seafloor that Emory had taken me to look at once in Coryth--at the Coast of a Thousand Colors with the fans of coral and so many vivid, tropical fish that I hadn’t even been able to count the different types from where we’d stood on the deck of a moored ship.

“I…” I started, my voice failing after just that first word. “My name is Nikita Novak. My father is the northern Herald to the King. I was…very involved.”

Tanner watched me, eyes flicking over my face. “I already knew who you were,” he admitted with a shrug and I looked up, lips pursed in an irritated line. “The Commander’s tattoos, the sword you were clutching at when I pulled you out of the water...I just thought you’d tell me, eventually, when you were ready, or that it would come up organically like it did today.”

“You let me _lie_ to you!”

He snorted, his eyes rolling to the ceiling. “You’re a terrible liar,” he echoed Sebastian’s earlier claim. “Is there any truth to what happened to Dumas, do you think? You know the King and his Immaran pet.”

“His _name_ is Sebastian Brighton,” I corrected again and Tanner scowled. “And he’s not Emory’s pet nor is he what you think he is.”

“So he’s not a Son of the Serpent?”

I hesitated and Tanner clicked his tongue. “Alright, he _is_ that, but Sebastian doesn’t kill without orders. He’s the weapon, not the hand that wields it.”

Tanner’s teeth clenched and unclenched and he pushed himself upright. “The new King keeps an awful lot of Immarans at his Court.”

Something in me bristled, as if that urge to defend him that I’d felt that day taken on Fox surged forth to the surface again and I pushed myself up, too, wobbling on my splinted leg and Tanner cocked his head. “The new King is the only reason Coryth is still standing. You have no _idea_ what Elizabeth Glenning was doing to those people…what she would have continued doing to fucking everyone in Coria if it weren’t for Emory. We’d all be at risk of wearing slave collars again.”

“So it’s true,” he said softly. “There were rumors about you and Emory Bordelon, of course, but nobody dared breathe a whisper about Vasilev Novak’s boy sleeping with the mad prince.”

“Fuck you, Tanner.”

He chuckled then and reached forward, tousling my hair so that I batted at him, pissed off and irritated, and if I’d been in a better place, physically, I would have knocked his fucking teeth down his throat and watched him choke on them for that comment. “I’m not judging you, _Nikita_. I just think you deserve better.”

“You don’t know him.”

He clicked his tongue. “He’s Emory Bordelon, sweetheart. Does anyone know him?”

Tanner moved toward the loft, swinging his broad, tall form up into the bed he had up there and I watched his candle go out from where I was still standing, fists pressed to the table. I wanted to refute everything he’d said. I _knew_ Emory. I knew him better than anyone else had ever bothered to know him. He’d been this untouchable _thing_ to so many people--Fox’s legitimized bastard, a halfling brat that belonged to the King, ‘the mad prince,’ the victim of brutal, wicked assault...but I’d gotten to know him. I knew what he liked to eat, what he liked to drink, and that he liked to work with his hands. In another life, he might have been an artisan...a craftsman. I knew he had a soft spot for dogs and puppies, for small children, and for any unwanted, helpless thing.

And I knew that when Emory loved something, he loved it completely. He threw his entire self into it and let it swallow him whole. I’d been so foolish to think I could ever survive not feeling that anymore...not drowning in the way that he loved me. I’d been stupid to believe I could ever fill the void he’d left.

Tanner, however, was right. I didn’t know Emory now. I didn’t know what kind of influences Cassie and Sebastian were in the long run. I didn’t know how me forcing him to leave me behind in Ravndal would change it...only that it _would_ change him. 

The Emory I had loved had flinched away from the idea of execution like it made him physically sick, but here was Tanner saying that people believed he used young Sebastian Brighton like a poisoned cup passed around at a party. 

Part of me wanted to throw up. Sebastian couldn’t have even been twenty by then. Nineteen, maybe. Barely more than a child and crippled in a way that most people never recovered from. When we’d left on the coronation march, he’d been still sloughing through the remnants of infection.

The Emory I had loved would have never turned a child into a personal, private tool of execution.

But then...when I’d been Sebastian’s age, he’d let me torture and slaughter that halfling boy in the dungeons. He’d reveled in it, in fact.

And I realized something then, standing there in Tanner’s little cottage in the middle of a Corian thunderstorm that lit the sky with brilliant flashes of lavender light….

I did not know Emory Bordelon. Nobody really did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A playlist~ This is...varied as far as style goes, but I stick to female artists for Cassie lists for obvious reasons. Also, because someone on tumblr messaged me to ask, her name is pronounced Cass-eye-oh-pee
> 
> \--Cassiope (Perondale) Brighton--  
> Nightmare, Halsey  
> Roar, Katy Perry  
> Most Girls, P!nk  
> Fighter, Christina Aguilera  
> Fight Song, Rachel Platten


End file.
